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Information Technology for the Virtual Museum
December 6-7, 2006 - S�nderborg, Denmark

Speakers

Gail Durbin (Victoria and Albert Museum, London):

Expertise and creativity: involving the visitor in the Virtual Museum

How can visitors be encouraged to participate in museum websites and how can we ensure that user-generated content adds to the interest and usefulness of the site rather than creating a burden of anxiety and work? Using examples largely from the Victoria and Albert Museum website (where one recent activity has attracted over 14,000 online responses) this session will look at some solutions and the issues that this type of web activity throws up.

Eero Hyv�nen (Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and University of Helsinki):

CultureSampo - Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web

CultureSampo ( http://www.seco.tkk.fi/applications/kulttuurisampo/) is an ontology-based semantic portal being developed within the National Semantic Web Ontology Project in Finland (FinnONTO) (http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/finnonto/). It provides a solution to the problem of making semantically heterogeneous content of different kinds semantically interoperable, and generalizies in this way our "MuseumFinland -- Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web" (http://www.museosuomi.fi) system focusing on artifacts. Content types being investigated include art (paintings, sculpture, graphics), images (photographs, films), sound (voice, music), cultural sites (nature sites, built environment), narratives (cultural processes, skills), literature (poetry, novels, research publications, biographies), and web content (pages, services). The annotation schema used is based on events and thematic roles, and the user interface uses facted semantic search, logic-based recommendations, and Ajax-based widgets, such as Google Maps and Simile Timeline. The content is provided by a variety of museums and cultural institutions in Finland.

Oreste Signore (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell' Informazione "A. Faedo", Pisa):

The semantic web and cultural heritage. Abstract (pdf).

Robert Tolksdorf (Institute of Computer Science, Freie Universit�t Berlin):

Semantic Web Applications

Semantic Web technologies have the potential to shift information integration applications to a new level of quality. In our talk we report on our experiences with building applications in domains like e-health, e-recruitment or e-tourism and the lessons learnt.

Johan M�hlenfeldt Jensen (Museum of Copenhagen):

October 2006 The Museum, Archives and Libraries of Copenhagen launch a presentation of the history of Copenhagen on the web, called Absalon.nu after the alleged founder of Copenhagen.

One of the scientific aims of absalon.nu has been to examine the extent to which already existing data could be mined in order to create the core of a system for presentation on the web for the general public. Large sums are invested in procuring the data in the exiting databases of the three institutions and it is therefore of obvious interest to be able to exploit this investment in the best possible way.

Although it is a commonplace that data made for internal purposes are seldom suited for use by the general public it is on the other hand the same types of information that are interesting in both cases. The crucial question is therefore how and to which extent these data can be used in a meaningful and user friendly way, and what type of transformation, ad additions are necessary for their use in a broader context.

Apart from more ordinary additions to data Absalon.nu has utilized two strategies.

First of all graphically: We intend to display related information using mindmaps and other graphical tools. In this way users will get information on the classifications etc. that are normally presupposed in users of the internal databases.

Secondly Absalon.nu intends to create parts of these relationships, through automated linguistic analysis of the conternt, taking into account not only the individual lemma (root-form of word) but also the meaning of the sentences based on a grammatical analysis.

As Absalon has just been launced and no significant user reactions exist, the paper will focus on presenting the ideas behind the site, and discuss some of the solutions chosen.

Roc�o Aguilar Chongtay (Mobile People, Denmark)

Non-invasive web personalization

This work describes a non-invasive web personalization design within a framework of a topic maps based virtual museum of history.

Web based applications are nowadays widely used for establishing virtual museums of all types. Virtual museums are repositories for collecting and displaying objects having scientific or historical or artistic value and can be designed as a web based educational tools with an information architecture based on scalable modular learning objects.

Many virtual museums are based on static content, making it difficult to keep the visitors' motivation, for this reason the design of a virtual museum should include not only a user interface with pedagogical quality but also a careful consideration on how to achieve the presentation of the most relevant content according to the users' interests [2]. The design's framework proposed for the virtual museum of history included a web content architecture with subject-based navigation interface, query-based information retrieval, as well as adaptive information presentation [3,4].

The growing availability of information on the web is pressing for many service providers to offer more adaptive and personalized applications. Personalization improves usability by facilitating users' navigation, reducing the time and effort to find relevant information.

Many personalized services on the web rely on user's direct feedback (ranking see [1]), this approach is invasive and in many cases the users are not interested in giving feedback. The approach described here suggests the implementation of personalized applications by the use of non-invasive web-browsing profiles based on sources of information available from users' web browsing behavior which can serve as indicant of users' interests, for example history, bookmarks, access logs (frequency and date) and content of pages visited.

To build a non-invasive personal web profile, it has been chosen to combine different mining technologies in order to handle different aspects of the information complexity on the web.

The different mining techniques are built into a system in which multiple agents handle separated tasks such as:

The architecture design was based on various web and knowledge technologies including XML and a standard for knowledge representation and interchange, known as Topic Maps, which has relevant features for this application such as organising large bodies of information and managing distributed knowledge and information.

The topic maps technology can be used at different interacting levels, in a virtual museum these levels can be for example:

  1. to manage and ease access to the history content and relevant hypermedia elements,
  2. to describe and manage the structure of learning modules, and
  3. to integrate knowledge about user profile and navigation behaviour in order to create adaptive personalised content options.

In this work the use of topic maps at level c to build a personalization and search profile is also described.

The application's framework was designed in a generic, modular and scalable fashion that can be used in different web based applications that requires adaptive management of distributed knowledge and information resources as well as query-based information retrieval.

References

[1] Balabanovic, M. An adaptive web page recommendation service. In Proc. 1st Intl. Conf Autonomous Agents, pages 378-385, 1997.

[2] Bowen, Jonathan. P. and Silvia Filippini-Fantoni (2004). Personalization and the Web from a Museum Perspective., Proc. MW2004: Museums and the Web 2004.

[3] Brusilovsky, P. and M. T. Maybury. (2002). From adaptive hypermedia to the adaptive Web. Communications of the ACM, 45(45), 30-33, May. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/506218.506239

[4] Hook, K. and Svensson, M. Evaluating adaptive navigation support. Proceedings of IUI'99, 1999, Los Angeles, USA

Sergio Lira (University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal)

An Information Model for Virtual Museums. The case of an Ecomuseum. (pdf)