The final results connect Roman heritage, rural businesses, visitor planning and stakeholder coordination in Sierra y Mancha Conquense, while providing a reusable model for other rural territories.
ARISE – Archaeological Routes for Inclusive Synergy & Entrepreneurship in Sierra y Mancha Conquense – has completed its nine-month implementation period within PoliRuralPlus and delivered a live digital service for the pilot territory. The platform is publicly available at https://arise.xilbi.com/ and brings together heritage discovery, route planning, rural-business visibility, territorial information and location-aware guidance in one integrated environment.
The project addressed a clear rural-development challenge. Sierra y Mancha Conquense contains major Roman archaeological assets, particularly Segóbriga, Valeria and Ercávica, but visitor information, local services and territorial coordination were fragmented. This limited the ability of the heritage network to support longer visitor journeys, wider local-business exposure and more coordinated action among territorial stakeholders.
Obsidian Innovation Institute – Associação and Xilbi Sistemas de Informacion SL developed ARISE as more than a conventional tourism website. The public platform allows users to explore points of interest on an interactive map, discover rural businesses, create multi-stop itineraries, access territorial news and funding opportunities, save route plans and interact with the ARISE Chat Agent powered by PoliRural Jackdaw. The service is available in Spanish, English and Portuguese.
The visitor-facing service is complemented by a restricted operational environment. Authorised users can manage businesses, routes, news, funding initiatives, promoted content and integrations, while the authenticated MAAT workspace supports stakeholder records, initiatives, tasks, route co-design, KPI and New European Bauhaus monitoring, meeting information and shared working resources. This structure connects public discovery with the operational functions required to keep the platform current and useful.
The technical result is a functioning and maintainable pilot deployment. ARISE uses a Laravel-based architecture, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap geospatial interfaces, structured data models, public and authenticated APIs, OpenAPI documentation and server-side connections to external services. The Jackdaw integration uses the geographical area selected by the user to provide spatially contextualised guidance without exposing service credentials or access tokens in the browser.
Quality and public credibility were central to the final implementation. The consortium strengthened multilingual coverage, content realism, image provenance, legal and privacy information, public contact functions, internal-link reliability and release testing.
ARISE also provides a practical contribution to the wider PoliRuralPlus ecosystem. It demonstrates how Jackdaw-supported guidance, multi-actor collaboration, structured territorial data and rural-business promotion can be adapted to a cultural-heritage setting. The platform connects visitor services with stakeholder coordination and provides documented interfaces that support controlled reuse and future data exchange.
The project concludes with a sustainability and replication basis as well as a live service. The production platform can continue to support Sierra y Mancha Conquense, while a reusable software distribution and technical documentation allow the model to be adapted to other rural areas. Replication primarily requires new territorial data, routes, businesses, branding, languages and stakeholder structures rather than redevelopment of the complete platform.
ARISE therefore leaves a concrete project legacy: a publicly accessible heritage and rural-service gateway, an operational stakeholder workspace, measurable user and business uptake, documented technical foundations and a transferable model for heritage-led rural innovation. The final result shows how digital tools can connect cultural assets, local enterprise and multi-actor governance to strengthen rural attractiveness and rural-urban cooperation.
The ARISE platform is available at: https://arise.xilbi.com/
Funding acknowledgement
PoliRuralPlus has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101136910. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
