Cooperative Design of an Interactive Museum Guide

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of supporting museum visitors in searching for interesting artworks and finding their visiting routes compatible with personal preferences. The proposed application uses knowledge related to museum building structure and topology, and to substantive content of museum collections. Therefore the cooperation between the designer of a museum guide with the museum curator, who provides information about artworks and their assignment to exhibitions, collections and rooms, is indispensable. All this data is stored in a graph, where nodes represent building spaces, edges correspond to accessibility relations between these spaces, while node attributes describe both geometrical properties of spaces and semantic information related to art pieces and collections. The user can specify artworks, exhibitions, collections he wants to visit together with personal preferences concerning the visiting path (like using lifts). Then graph algorithms are used to find the most appropriate route for the user. Moreover, the user can define personalized collections and share them with other users of the application.