Although Augmented Reality (AR) technology has entered many market and knowledge domains such as games and leisure activities, it remains rather limited in digital heritage. After studying the potentiality of using modern AR elements in a museum context, this paper proposes the use of additional game and educational elements in the core AR application in order to enhance the overall on-the-spot museum visitor’s experience. An agile AR application design methodology was followed by taking into account the needs of small-to-medium sized real-world museums. Moreover, a heuristic evaluation protocol was applied by a group of experts in order to test the proof-of-concept AR application, in which some novel elements were proposed such as the AR quiz game. The main findings indicate that enhanced AR experiences in museum settings can make a nice fit with the user environment, physical and perceptual abilities, known metaphors, and user position and motion in 3D space. Moreover, AR services can be provided under a minimum distraction and physical effort. As a conclusion, AR technologies are mature enough to be standardized for museum usage, while the audience seems to be ready to take advantage of the related enhanced museum experiences to maximize both user satisfaction and learning outcomes.

Blockchain technology advancements have made it feasible to build secure, decentralized networks with numerous use cases in various industries, including banking, education, government, and health. In higher education, there is a significant need for certification and credential verification through digital means, as fake certificates are common in the labor market. The BlockAdemiC system presented in this article falls into solutions for such issues. BlockAdemiC is a blockchain-based educational platform that makes use of cutting-edge features in blockchain technology to ensure the required degree of trust both at the individual user and institutional level. Specifically, BlockAdemiC represents a digital distributed security system for the certification and verification of educational activities, degrees, and skills in higher education and lifelong learning, producing an immutable educational passport. Information distributed using blockchain enhances trust in the exchange of information between institutions, agencies, companies, and alumni and introduces a trustworthy mechanism for content verification and authentication. For self-sovereign identity and identification management, the system utilizes distributed ledger technology via Hyperledger frameworks and offers users authority over their identities and credentials, removing the need for the involvement of central authorities to validate and verify user identities. Smart contracts are additionally supported, which provide the connection for storing student activities that take place on educational platforms on the EOSIO blockchain. The BlockAdemiC was evaluated via a technological feasibility study focusing on the system’s performance. The initial findings show that the system can efficiently process a high load of queries in parallel similar to the real-world situation and can be further considered for large-scale deployment and use.

There is great potential in interdisciplinary traveling platforms mingling knowledge about cultural heritage aspects, such as places with schedules providing visits or even containing augmented reality features also, along with environmental concerns to enhance personalized tourist experience and tripping avocation. For an ontological framework to support and nominate trip detours of targeted interests according to end-users, it should incorporate and unify as much heterogeneous information, deriving either from web sources or wherever there are ubiquitously available such as sensors or open databases. A plethora of qualitatively diverse data along with adequate quantities of them escalate the contingent results in terms of conferring a plurality of relevant options which can be utterly manifested through involving axioms with rule-based reasoning functionalities upon properties considered to be irrelevant to each other at first glance. Thus, managing to import predefined concepts from other ontologies, such as temporality or spatiality, and combine them with new defined concepts to tourist assets, such as points of interest, results in novel meaningful relationships never established before. Apart from the utilization of pre-existent resources and logic towards automatic detouring suggestions, a wide-spectrum modeling enables a suitable problem statement relevant to the e-Tracer framework and comprehension of the issues, providing the opportunity of statistical analysis of knowledge when adequate amounts amassed.