Internet of Things: Evolution and Potential for Preserving and Enjoying Cultural Heritage

Introduction

This chapter intends to achieve the following objectives:

• i)

  Provide knowledge about the chronological development of IoT technology from one generation to the upcoming generation.

• ii)

  Raise discussion about the emergence of digital technologies, such as IoT and understand IoT characteristics.

• iii)

  Describe and discuss the characteristics of IoT technology.

• iv)

  Discuss IoT usage scenarios and possibilities.

• v)

  Discuss the role and contribution of IoT technology for preserving and dissemination cultural heritage.

To write this chapter, the authors reviewed existing studies that describe IoT technology chronological development. In this context, this chapter splits the development of IoT into three generations. The time set for IoT development starts from 1974 to the present in which the chapter discusses all essential technologies that emerged into IoT. After analyzing the IoT development, this chapter describes the possible usage scenarios of IoT technology, especially in cultural preservation and dissemination.

This chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section describes the chronological development of IoT such as IoT generations, and the IoT characteristics. The second section describes the usage scenarios of IoT technology like IoT and cultural heritage. Lastly, this chapter added a conclusion and discussion of results.

Iot Generations: Chronological Approach

Currently, the Internet is one of the most demanding and useful technology to perform daily life activities, especially in education, entertainment, and business sectors. The relation between devices and Internet technology provides smart platforms; devices on these platforms have the freedom to make decisions and solve problems by themselves, without any human intervention (Gartner, 2015).

In the first forty years after the invention of the Internet technology by ARPANET (Ye & Huang, 2011), people used the Internet technology to create person to person or person to group connections, via e-mail, and social media’s networks (O’Hara, 2013). Later, the usage of the Internet increased in all domains of human life, such as education, entertainment, and medical purposes. It is expected that, in the future, with the help of Internet technology, it will be possible to link every single device, machine, and objects through wired or wireless Internet protocol networks.

Internet technology integrates different types of applications and protocols that have capabilities to build a comprehensive and interconnected computer networks system. Moreover, through computer networks systems, billions of users interact with each other for educational, social, or business purposes. As such, one can agree that humanity is passing an era, in which communication and connectivity with other humans is not a big challenge. Lately, attention diverted to the development of systems, in which it will be possible to integrate human and digital devices. The integration of human and digital devices is called IoT (Internet of Things) (Buyya, & Dastjerdi, 2016).

Many novel concepts are emerging from the concept of “Internet of Things” (IoT) and into our daily lives. In a smart world, IoT is an innovative and growing concept, in which digitally augmented everyday things are connected and with computers, mobiles, actuators and vehicles (Dujovne, Watteyne, Vilajosana, & Thubert, 2014; Misra, Kumar, Agarwal, & Agarwal, 2016).

IoT is a concept that represents a mixture of different networks, in which objects are physically connected through electronic devices and software applications, allowing the physical devices to gather data from various destinations, such as browsing websites, sending e-mails, and multimedia contents. Many developed countries, such as the USA, Japan, and Europe, are considering IoT as the idea of novelty and development, both at an academic and commercial level. Therefore, numerous universities and industries research centres are doing extensive research on IoT technologies (Miorandi, Sicari, De Pellegrthe ini, the & Chlamtac, 2012; Chung & Jeong, 2020; M. & Ravi, 2020).