Visiting artistic and historical sights-GIS/GPS experiments on multimedia guides

In this paper the design and realization of a portable system for planning visits to artistic sights is presented. The system uses a multimedia approach for presenting monuments, interactively providing images, multi-lingual texts and audio descriptions. The system’s asset is complete software control in different operations without using commercial programs that can normally be found for standard operations. Thus, its navigation capability, based on GPS and Galileo signals, has been obtained using original programs and algorithms. The system’s characteristics, applied and tested on Bologna, are described. Different types of geographical maps can be chosen as a background.