UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre has set ten criteria for assessing Outstanding Universal Values (OUVs) for the inscription of properties on the World Heritage List. Recognising the growing challenge for heritage conservation and the need for professionals to work within systemic, holistic, and integrated frameworks in managing cultural heritage and using biodiversity as an OUV, this paper investigates how the intangible and tangible cultural and natural heritage of the Region of East Macedonia and Thrace, Greece is interconnected over the course of centuries. We review the evolution of the existing legislative framework to protect archaeological treasures and local flora and fauna and document the richness of ongoing ecological and biological processes in the region for strengthening the arguments for an integrated protection and management system. Locating the archaeological sites and monuments in protected natural zones and areas of exceptional beauty with the use of the open code QGIS programme and focusing on their description and analysis, the present research recommends their interlinked management under the leadership of a Joint Destination Management Organisation.

We present a novel form of scalable knowledge representation about agents in a simulated democracy, e-polis, where real users respond to social challenges associated with democratic institutions, structured as Smart Spatial Types, a new type of Smart Building that changes architectural form according to the philosophical doctrine of a visitor. At the end of the game players vote on the Smart City that results from their collective choices.Our approach uses deductive systems in an unusual way: by integrating a model of democracy with a model of a Smart City we are able to prove quality aspects of the simulated democracy in different urban and social settings, while adding ease and flexibility to the development. Second, we can infer and reason with abstract knowledge, which is a limitation of the Unity platform; third, our system enables real-time decision-making and adaptation of the game flow based on the player’s abstract state, paving the road to explainability.Scalability is achieved by maintaining a dual-layer knowledge representation mechanism for reasoning about the simulated democracy that functions in a similar way to a two-level cache. The lower layer knows about the current state of the game by continually processing a high rate of events produced by the in-built physics engine of the Unity platform, e.g., it knows of the position of a player in space, in terms of his coordinates x,y,z as well as their choices for each challenge. The higher layer knows of easily-retrievable, user-defined abstract knowledge about current and historical states, e.g., it knows of the political doctrine of a Smart Spatial Type, a player’s philosophical doctrine, and the collective philosophical doctrine of a community players with respect to current social issues.

The Risk and Resilience Assessment Center (RiskAC) research project is a joint effort of more than 80 researchers from Departments of the Democritus University of Thrace, the Aristotle University and from the Institute of Engineering Seismology and Earthquake Engineering