XSL-based Content Management for Multi-presentation Digital Museum Exhibitions

Abstract

Similar to a conventional museum, a digital museum draws a set of objects from its collection of digital artifacts to produce exhibitions about a specific topic. Online exhibitions often consist of a variety of multimedia objects such as webpages, animation, and video clips. In a physical museum, the exhibition is confined by the physical limitation of the artifacts. That is, there can only be one exhibition using the same set of artifacts. Thus, if one wishes to design different exhibitions about the same topic for different user groups, one has to use different sets of artifacts, and exhibit them in different physical locations.

A digital museum does not have such physical restrictions. One can design different exhibitions about the same topic for adults, children, experts, novices, high bandwidth users, and low bandwidth users, all using the same set of digital artifacts. A user can simply click and choose the specific style of exhibition that she wants to explore. The difficulty here is that it is time- consuming to produce illustrative and intriguing online exhibitions. One can spend hours designing webpages for just one exhibition alone, not to mention several. In this paper, we present the design of an XSL-based Multi- Presentation Content Management System (XMP-CMS). This framework is a novel approach for organizing digital collections, and for quickly selecting, integrating, and composing objects from the collection to produce exhibitions of different presentation styles, one for each user group. A prototype based on our framework has been implemented and successfully used in the production of a Lanyu digital museum. Using our method, the Lanyu Digital Museum online exhibition has several features: (1) It provides an easy way to compose artifacts extracted from the digital collection into exhibitions. (2) It provides an easy way to create different presentations of the same exhibition content that are catered to users with different needs. (3) It provides easy-to-use film-editing capability to re-arrange an exhibition and to produce new exhibitions from existing ones.