Challenges in designing of cooperative mobile information systems for the risk map of Italian cultural heritage

Italian cultural heritage is one of the most famous in the world, but unfortunately is under risk of destruction. The Italian government has started a project to define the risk map of Italian cultural heritage (MARIS). Starting from this real example, we describe an example of a cooperative and mobile information system devoted to acquiring data about cultural heritage in an electronic way through a set of cooperative processes. In this paper, we show features of such an information system and critically analyze the main challenges that both information system and middleware designers have to face. Moreover, we present an attempt to characterize the elaboration capability of devices of an information system, by means of a dynamic definition, with the goal to evaluate which processes can be hosted in devices within a distributed and mobile environment.