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During the last decades the laboratory mechanical characterization of asphalt concretes has evolved thanks to the evelopment of innovative testing methodologies and equipments like those for the assessment of stiffness modulus. Those pieces of equipments enable the user to obtain the mechanical parameters of asphalts needed for the road avement structures rational and mechanistic design. The European Standard EN12697 part 26 ‘Stiffness’ has been ecently harmonized in Italy by UNI. This standard describes some of the available methods for the laboratory ssessment of asphalt stiffness, defining each test procedure as well as the calculations needed to obtain the mentioned arameters. In this paper two different methodologies have been adopted and compared performing tests on a single bituminous mix; indirect tensile tests (IT-CY) and four point flexural tests 4PB-PR) are the most common configurations for stiffness assessment, even though several set-up variables are ossible. After the stiffness appraisal and the comparison of the tests by means of the EN13108 specifications, the ethod nd timing of production of specimens as well as those needed to set up and to perform the test have been considered.

In this final chapter, we show an application of discussed data management pervasive technologies for a cultural heritage smart scenario by describing the PATCH (Portable context-aware ATlas for Cultural Heritage) system—a “portable” prototype of a multimedia and social “atlas” of cultural points of interest, in which browsing is driven by the context. The system is characterized by several features typical of pervasive systems: (1) capability of gathering information from distributed and heterogeneous pervasive data sources (e.g., sensor networks, social networks, digital libraries and archives, multimedia collections, web data services, etc.); (2) context awareness and, consequently, ability of providing useful and personalized data and services for users on the basis of their preferences and of the surrounded environment; (3) advanced data management techniques and technologies necessary to deal with the information variety, velocity, and volume; and (4) advanced smart services as retrieval, recommendation, analytics, and other utilities. A specific application of our system within DATABENC is proposed by means of a real case study related to the Paestum Ruins.

The scope of data management in pervasive systems is to give users an instantaneous and complete access to any information at anytime and anywhere in highly dynamic environments where both data and source availabilities vary with high frequency, especially with regard to location and time. In a certain sense, it represents an inverse paradigm with respect to distributed databases: we do not speak anymore of users acting on a passive database but of devices that act both as data producers and consumers, while the system can process the incoming data selecting, for each individual user, the interesting bit of information.

In this chapter, we describe the main aspects of multimedia social networks (MSNs). We then describe the project global interactive virtual archaeological system (GIVAS), a multimedia environment for archaeologists, cultural heritage researchers, and normal tourists that provides a comprehensive collaborative platform for managing, searching, visualizing, and sharing multimedia cultural heritage information, using an innovative social network approach.

Context has been defined as the knowledge that can be used to characterize the situation of any entity that is relevant for the (pervasive) system under consideration: given a target application scenario, a context-aware system supports users and devices by providing selective access to the set of data and operations (e.g., interesting services and information, environmental data, close-by people, points of interest etc.) which is relevant in each specific context. More than that, the relative importance of a piece of information to the same user in different contexts or, reciprocally, to different users in the same context may vary enormously; thus the system can personalize information even further by ranking the provided data on the basis of (contextual) user preferences. This chapter presents an introduction to context-aware information management, first providing a literature review and then introducing the main steps needed to design a context-aware system. Context-related problems particularly relevant within pervasive data management are then discussed. We briefly analyze techniques to efficiently associate contexts with information chunks, the evolution issues which arise when the context representation changes over time, the discovery and application of contextual user preferences, and, last but certainly not least, how context awareness can be enforced in the middleware of a pervasive system.