A Semantic Approach to Build Personalized Interfaces in the Cultural Heritage Domain S. Valtolina, P. Mazzoleni and S. Franzoni
E. Bertino
Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione University of Milan, Italy
Cerias and CS Department, Purdue University West Lafayette (Indiana), USA
+39-0250316273
+39-0250316273
{valtolin,mazzolen,franzoni}@dico.unimi.it
[email protected]
ABSTRACT In this paper we present T.Arc.H.N.A. (Towards Archaeological Heritage New Accessibility), a system we have built to disseminate cultural heritage distributed across multiple museums. T.Arc.H.N.A. addresses, through an integrated system, the requirements of two categories of users: the end users that need to access information according to their interests and interaction preferences, and the domain experts and museum curators that need to develop thematic tours providing end users with a better understanding of the single artefact or collection. To address those requirements, T.Arc.H.N.A. makes use of a semantic representation of the given heritage domain in order to build multiple visual interfaces, called "Virtual Wings" (VWs ). Such interfaces allow users to navigate through data available from digital archives and thematic tours and to create their own personalized virtual visits of the contents. An interactive application integrating personalized digital guides (using PDAs) and 360 panoramic images is the example of VW presented.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – graphical user interfaces (GUI), interaction styles, user-centered design.
General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.
Keywords Visual Interface Design, Visual Querying, Interactive Interfaces, Interfaces for cultural heritage.
1. INTRODUCTION T.Arc.H.N.A. is the Etruscan name of the ancient city of Tarquinia (Italy) and T.Arc.H.N.A. (Towards Archaeological Heritage New Accessibility) is the name of the European founded project presented in this paper. T.Arc.H.N.A is a multidisciplinary
project, the goal of which is to develop new models and tools supporting a personalized access to cultural heritage collected in multiple museums in order to enhance the value of the Etruscan culture, which goes back to the roots of the European History. Cultural heritage (CH) is a field of study which has been evolving over time. New artistic work, archaeological discoveries and scientific or artistic studies achieved within a single collection of a museum and across multiple archives contribute to a constant revision of the procedures experts follow to organize, analyze and disseminate their data. During the last decades, the introduction of Information Technology (IT) techniques in the Cultural Heritage domain has contributed to an even faster evolution of the processes typical of this domain. Database management systems (DBMS) and data acquisition techniques help in digitalizing and managing larger amounts of data. Cad-based digital reconstructions and data mining techniques support the data analysis and organization. New technologies like audio guides, palmtops, virtual reality and natural interaction solutions facilitate the dissemination of the results to large public [2, 19, 20]. The combined use of such technologies and tools greatly improve all processes in the acquisition, management and dissemination of CH information. Dissemination is perhaps the most crucial set of processes for institutions, like museums, that have to re-qualify and diversify their cultural contents by at same time reaching a broad and heterogeneous audience. In this context, IT technology may provide cost-effective innovative solutions. An important problem when designing, building and setting up a technological installation in a cultural institution is to represent not only the visible but also the invisible, that is concepts, relations, suggestions. Such content enhancements make visits more interesting for users in that they introduce a new dimension in the process of content fruition through the interaction between the observers and the observed objects. Obviously in cultural institutions, collections must be necessarily exhibited in the available physical space; however it is important to maintain and present to the users information that logically connect the various physical items of each collection. Preparation of informative materials, promotion of expositive itineraries, organization of showcases according particular themes are traditional activities supporting the visits and the fruition of the content. Alongside them, in order to complete and enrich the experience, it is useful to provide cultural institutions with technological installations able to increase the context awareness for the visit. Well designed installations allow museum visitors to enhance the collections exhibited in the physical spaces with
additional information and “virtual” artefacts, and to support learning and discovery experiences. Four aspects that must be considered in order to develop a well designed system that complements the physical exhibition of CH[12]: 1. The experience in a museum happens in a real space: the features of the system must be designed according to the features of the physical space where the system is going to be located. 2. The experience in a museum is a social experience: this aspect must be emphasized by exploiting people involvement. 3. The experience in a museum is not linear: contextual factors of distraction must be considered and possibly used to design a dynamic and customized experience. 4. In a museum learning is supported by the capability to perform meaningful choices: a good system allows the users to choose the interaction tools and customize the CH fruition processes. In summary it is important that such a system be easily adapted and personalized. In order to achieve these goals in T.Arc.H.N.A., we have taken the approach of separating the logical CH contents from their presentation and of providing a mechanism, referred to as narration, through which domain experts can contextualize and connect the various CH artefacts in order to generate customized presentation of the contents. Such an organization is supported by a modular architecture, which makes easy to adapt the system components to the particular context of use. Such architecture is composed of three main components: Data Model, T.Arc.H.N.A. Narration Engine, and Virtual Wings (VWs). In particular, a VW represents a customized view of CH information that is related to the physically displayed artefacts and thus complements them. Several VWs can be available at the same time, each providing different interaction tools or catering to different classes of users. VWs that are being developed as part of T.Arc.H.N.A. include interactive applications integrated with personalized digital guides (that use PDAs), electronic whiteboards for children interactions, and customized virtual reality (VR) environments. Each VW is built as an independent component which accesses the underlying engine and dynamically extracts the information the user is interested in. The VWs applications developed so far in order to provide access to the Tarquinia’s CH have been designed to be interactive and adaptable to the interests, the school level (in the case of young users), and the age of the users. The “Data Model”, expressed using CIDOC/CRM [4], aims at providing a uniform access to all existing digital archives coming from museums and excavation sites. The T.Arc.H.N.A. Narration Engine is the component that historic or art experts and museum curators use to search relevant artefacts in order to specify narrations concerning the cultural heritage of interest. The relation between artefacts and narrations is not statically maintained, but it is dynamically computed by traversing the data model. Such an approach increases the flexibility and the extensibility of the solution because heritage added to the data repository, storing data represented according to the data model, are automatically associated with the narrations without requiring any human intervention. The city of Tarquinia, recently registered on UNESCO's World Cultural Heritage List, is a perfect scenario to apply our approach. The reason is that Tarquinia is the only Etruscan city the history of which is documented by a comprehensive collection of data
and artefacts extracted from the necropolis, the port and the city center. Moreover, over the centuries, the Arts and Crafts Heritage of Tarquinia has been dispersed in a large number of Archaeological Museums and Institutions in Europe. T.Arc.H.N.A. overcomes the delocalization problems and contributes in building the network of Etruscan culture each museum can disseminate to its users according to multiplecustomizable solutions. The aim of this paper is to present a framework able to support the visitors needs of customizations adapting the system components according their context of use. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 compares different approaches to develop well designed cultural installations. Section 3 describes our solution and the motivation behind our work. Section 4 illustrates the architecture of the system and the implementation of a case study. Finally Section 5 concludes the paper and outlines future work.
2. RELATED WORKS Recent studies have investigated new methodologies to well design multimedia interactive systems able to adapt to different users needs and preferences. Thevenin and Coutaz [16] introduce the notion of plasticity like “the capacity of a user interface to withstand variations of both the system physical characteristics and the environment while preserving usability”. Actually the plasticity involves not only the components connected to the user interface, but it must affect the entire functionality of the application. The plasticity thus identifies the capacity of the entire system, not only of the user interface, to adapt to the context of use. For example when a new service becomes available, the system must be able to integrate it [1]. The term of context of use defines the specific cultural characters affecting and distinguishing the work environments of the users and that must be conveyed in the virtual environments. In practice and for implementation issues the context of use can be seen as a triple: [1] where: - user identifies the pattern of the actual person that will use the interactive system; - platform is the set of hardware and software components ; - environment describes the physical and social circumstances where the interaction takes place. From our point of view the context is characterized by two additional components: history and content. The history can be seen as the recording of the sequence of interactions between users and systems in which they communicate by materializing and interpreting a sequence of messages at successive points in time [3, 6]. Future choices and interactions can depend on such history. The content is represented by a set of articulated messages presented by the system according a specific computational meaning and subject of interpretation by the users, depending on their profile and interests. Starting from the types and complexity of the content the interface is organized accordingly.
2.1 User Interfaces of Museum Systems In this paper we are interested in interfaces designed to be used in cultural institutions.. Nowadays new technologies are extensively applied in public spaces, and many research projects in the HCI (Human computer interaction) field address this specific area. The state of art is very articulated and complex and it is subject to
continuous innovation. In this subsection, we present a view of the most used devices according to their evolution and their interactive features. To allow a museum to turn into a true centre of cultural propulsion, many tools supporting playful and educational activities have been developed. Audio guide tools are widely used in museums but they only simplify the classic visits by substituting the papery guides. The main drawback of these tools is their low interactivity level and the lack of opportunities for interaction and collaborative exploration among the visitors. An evolution of the audio guides is represented by PDAs (personal digital assistants) that increase the level of interactivity. Spasojevic and Kindberg [15] analyze the technologies for connecting the physical and the virtual environments. The museum exhibits are augmented with information and services presented in the form of web pages accessible to PDA guides. Visitors then can use these PDAs to plan their visit, bookmark the pages and in case bring them at home. Other solutions suggest the use of touch screen. In some cases, the displays are connected in order to support the collaboration among the visitors. Many studies have demonstrated that these instruments, not only do not encourage the collaboration among the visitors, but also require a certain amount of energy and cognitive effort in order to be fully understood, thus reducing their usability. In other situations, these installations shift the user’s attention away from the content to the pleasant and enjoyable interaction [13]. Moreover, additional problems arise from the impossibility to offer simultaneous access to all the visitors. To overcome these limitations, new solutions based on the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented realty (AR) techniques have been investigated. A survey of this kind of systems shows a large variety among the adopted technological solutions, such as immersive CAVE or wearable computers for mixed reality [9,10,18]. Problems inherent to these technologies are related to the loss of the physical reference due to the separation between the virtual and the real environment. These tools also distract the visitors and shift the attention away from the cultural content. The last approach we consider is the so-called natural interaction, which, by means of ubiquitous computers and the adoption of techniques for gesture and facial expression recognition, provide to the user enjoyable and highly interactive experiences. Without wearing any devices or learning complex instructions, the visitors is able to interact with the environment in a natural and intuitive way. Some examples of natural interfaces include: interactive floors, interactive windows, interactive tables, interactive surfaces [17]. All of these solutions suffer from the impossibility of customizing the contents according to the user profile and interests, the features of the device and the context of use. The use of database management systems in museum installations is a well-established reality. Cultural and historical information vary greatly in nature and scope, ranging from textual data to photos, drawing or 3D objects. Our approach aims at organizing the CH knowledge in a shared domain and at automatically integrating information retrieved from multiple data sources belonging to the institutions taking part to the project. Several European projects have investigated approaches to represent the semantic historical and cultural contexts for multimedia systems located in museums. This is the case of the
ARCO and the SCULPTEUR projects [9,10,14]. These projects have developed ontologies for cultural assets, in order to define metadata able to describe historical and cultural objects and their digital representations. These sets of metadata are based on different international standards, such as CIDOC/CRM and DUBLIN CORE [7]. Our approach differs from work done in these fields in that it supports a dynamic extraction of the information users are interested in. This information is retrieved by traversing the T.Arc.H.N.A. data model. Such model represents the T.Arc.H.N.A. CH according to an organization way that is independent from the number, types and locations of the digital archives. More details on this solution are described in the sections 4.
3. OUR APPROACH An exposition in a museum is structured according to a welldefined theme devised by the museum curators. Our solution wants to overcome the linearity of the visit and make the users able to define their routes across the space in which the exposition takes place, according to their interests. When a person visits a museum can be active or passive; she/he can be looking for entertainment or be more interested in learning something new; she/he would like to live an esthetical experience or simply she/he is an expert of the field. [11] In our approach we aim to create experiences combining a special theme of interest with the specific visiting style of a visitor allowing to stage a customized itinerary where the visitor attends according different modalities. The dynamic process that characterizes the visitor behaviour is based on the notion of context. From our point of view, the context is the personal profile that defines visitors’ characters like age, language and expectations they have before starting the visit; the social context that comprises the people with whom the visitors may be in touch during the visit; the physical context that is represented by the space of the museum, its structure and the available installations. In order to support such “interactive experience model”[5] our approach allows the acquisition of multimedia information from different sources through an automatic census, and the connection of this information to the artefacts of interest. The application’s interface changes according to the visitor profile and the device used to perform the interaction. One of the functions supported by our system is the automatic generation of narrations linked to a particular artefact A narration is a description of a story, a tale, an interpretation of one (or multiple) artefact(s) and it is used to contextualize it (them) within the society, use, rite it (they) belong(s). Single artefacts are not stand alone providers of information; instead they are tightly connected to the life of the artists who produced them and/or the ancient population that used them according to their original function. A correct contextualization of these historical and anthropological references connected to each artefact, is the key element for a visitor who wants to really know and understand the artefact. As any research publication, there can be several narrations concerning a given artefact, each one focusing on a specific topic: its purpose in the society (religion or commercial functions, habits), the time period (objects in different periods could be used for different purposes), who created them, and so forth.
One of our real scenarios sees a visitor that, equipped with a palmtop provided by the museum, can connect to several multimedia stations located in different rooms. The palmtop is used to store information about the visitor profile, like her/his age or language. The synchronization between the palmtop and the multimedia station allows one to generate an interface which adapts itself according the visitor’s profile. The multimedia station displays a virtual 360 degree panorama of the museum rooms, through which the visitor can select the artefact of interest. Once the choice has been made, the system generates some narrations involving the selected artefact. These narrations are interactive and personalized itineraries that the visitor can download on the palmtop and follow in the real space through an integrated map of the museum, which is also loaded on the palmtop. This case study is described in detail in section 4.1. Efficient, easy to use and easy to learn installations allow one to couple the real environment with multimedia objects able to virtually augment the spaces and its features. Placing a multimedia station in a museum makes it possible to present more items than those physically available, for example artefacts retrieved from digital archives of other institutions. The museums connected to the T.Arc.H.N.A. system can thus share their digital archives. Our approach allows one to gather information from these archives and generate narrations involving objects located in different physical spaces, capturing their semantic correlations, and augmenting them with contextual information. More details are given in the section 4. Moreover, during the visit, our system can accompany the visitor through time and space by making use of location-based services from multimedia stations to palmtops held by users. This kind of augmented reality can stimulate the collaboration among the visitors, allowing them to share personalized narrations and eventually to leave comments concerning the experienced itinerary; in the end, the comments can be integrated in the multimedia stations.
4. T.Arc.H.N.A. ARCHITECTURE 4.1 Virtual Wings The main elements of our system are the VWs, which are the tools available to museums for disseminating their collections along with the narrations specified by domain experts. VWs are conceived as visual interactive interfaces through which users can specify their preferences and build their own “virtual” tours independently from the “real” organization of the artefacts in the museum. At the time of writing, we have developed several VWs: a VW has been developed to support personalized 3D environments able to display artefacts physically located either in the museum warehouses or part of collections other than the one in which the VW is installed [8]. Another VW we are developing makes use of interactive whiteboards to propose thematic treasure hunting for students who visit the museum with their schools. Organized in teams, students compete by identifying in the museum all the artefacts related to a given thematic. By using the interactive whiteboard and the narrations specified by domain experts, each team of students is then asked to find context and anthropological relations between findings and to organize them according to a chronological order. The goal of the VW is to encourage students
to analyze the artefacts in a museum and to present them CH information by using a simple and interactive approach. Independently from the type of VW and the device implementing it, the main goal is to build solutions in which there is a clear distinction between the content of the interface and its materialization [3, 6]. Whereas the interface materialization depends from the specific user profile, used device and context of use, the content of the interface should be built using the following three main components, each of which supports different forms of adaptation: - Data Component. In addition to the physical artefacts, museums own important digital archives which are usually not accessible to final users. In this direction, user interfaces adopted by the VW should give access to the digital archives. In particular, they should allow users to select the information they are mostly interested in. - Narration Component. Narrations, built as dynamic components on top of existing digital archives and collections, have specific visual requirements VW interfaces should satisfy. In this context, the main problems concern the way to present the links between the artefacts and the narrations (and vice versa) and the approach used to make the user aware that she/he is free to move among the various narrations according to her/his preferences. On the other hand, when the skills of the visitor do not recommend free navigation, restrictions in terms of data content (e.g., present only narrations referring to the artefacts presented in the museum) and thematic (e.g. show only narrations adapt for middle-school students) should be considerate. - Connection Component. To increase the value of a real visit, the visual interfaces have to allow the users to switch from the real exhibition to the “virtual content” provided to her/him by the VW and vice-versa. While several approaches have been developed for collecting data from the real scenario and use them as input for the virtual elements [13, 15], up to our knowledge no approaches have been developed supporting a flexible and customizable visualization of the results of the requests submitted to the virtual elements in the real exhibition. Those components should be built as interconnected but separate modules, in order to allow multiple VW to share them. It is also important to remark that the various VW are developed so to be independent from the specific museums using them, from the digital archives presented, and from the narrations available. Changing each of those elements should be transparent to the visual interface which should be able to adjust accordingly. In the following, we discuss the details of the VW we have developed to disseminate the artefacts located at the National Museum of Tarquinia (Italy). Note that the VW we present do not want to be innovative with respect to the adopted technologies. The main goal is to provide flexible interfaces, built according to the T.Arc.H.N.A. model, through which museums users can enhance their visits by accessing the narrations specified by domain experts and by personalizing these visits according to various dimensions The VW is composed by two main components. The first component is accessible either via web prior visiting the museum (e.g. at home or school) or using one of the multimedia stations available at the entrance of the museum; the second one can be used via handheld devices, when visiting the real collections.
When the user begins the visit, she/he is asked to access one of the multimedia stations available at the entrance of the museum. The information is presented to the user using an interactive map
of the museum in which single expositive areas are presented using 360 panoramic images (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. A screen shot of s 360 panoramic image. This approach gives the user a first overview of the artefacts exhibited in the museum along with their organization in the areas. Like others 360 panoramic tools, in our solution users can interact with the system by selecting some sensible areas (called hotspots) in the panoramic images and load additional information about a specific artefact or another relevant area of the museum. This is also useful for users to load all the narrations associated to an artefacts. On the other hand, unlike all other 360 panoramic tools currently available, our solution gives the users the possibility to identify on the map the location of a specific artefact and more importantly the locations of all the artefacts relevant for a given narration. For example, given an area showing all the vases found in a tomb, our system can highlight only the vases which belong to a particular funerary ritual. This is an important functionality which allows the user to either start from an artefact (or a set of artefacts) and identify all the narrations which are associated with it, or start selecting her/his preferred topics (e.g., funerary rituals, interactions with other culture, and so forth) and dynamically identify all the artefacts she/he should pay special attention when visiting the museum. The process is iterative and user can repeat it until she/he identifies the themes which better answer her/his requirements. To speed up the process and to help user selecting the information which better fits her/his expectations, an automatic process is used to filter out both data and narrations based on the user age, favourite language, knowledge of the specific domain, and expected duration of the visit. When the process is completed, the system generates a personalized tour of the museum according to the user preferences. The personalized information about the relevant artefacts (represented as 2D maps of the exhibition areas in which
artefacts are highlighted) along with the narrations (both in textual and audio format) are downloaded to the PDA (either personal or rented at the museum) of the visitor. Before describing the second component of the VW, it is important to spend few more words to motivate our approach. At first sight, one might argue that users are not interested to execute the additional tasks of selecting the relevant narrations and artefacts before starting the visit. However, when a user visits a museum, she/he usually has a vague idea of the overall content (especially if the museum is large) but knows exactly some of most important artefacts (or collections) exhibited and she/he is usually interested to know the physical location of them so to be able to plan her/his visit according to the them. The second component is the handheld device the visitors utilize to visit the museum according to their personalized tour. The PDA does not only provide information about the narrations and the specific artefacts but it also specifies the personalized path, according to the narrations selected, the user should follow in the museum. This gives the user the possibility to quickly visit some of the areas and to spend longer times in others. At any time during the visit, the user can also revise her/his requirements by accessing some of the multimedia stations located in the museum. The system keeps track of the narrations and the artefacts already visited by the user and is thus able to present a new set of narrations from which the user can choose. Note that when building our VW we intentionally disregarded the idea of loading all available information in the PDA because we did not want the focus of the visitor to be moved away from the real exhibition. Today, users are used to visit a museum using maps and audio-guides but no other “more technological solutions”. Therefore, we kept separated the phase of the tour
personalization from the visit itself. As a side effect, this approach also gives the possibility for the users to prepare their visit at home (or at school, in case of students) and then having a better understanding of the heritage of the museum at the time of the visit.
4.2 Data Model As we already mentioned, the domain information are scattered in several digital archives, owned by different organizations, like museums, art galleries, universities. Each archive adopts its own specific internal representation of the entities it deals with, and each representation differs from the others in the data structures adopted to represent the entities and in the intended meaning associated with them. The semantic and structural heterogeneity of the data sources poses two problems: how to uniformly access the data and to unambiguously interpret it. We have addressed both these integration issues by introducing a semantic layer on top of the data sources. We have developed an ontology to formally specify the meaning of the concepts relevant for the T.Arc.H.N.A. domain and the existing relations between them. Instead of defining a suitable ontology from scratch, that would have been a complex and time-consuming task, we have taken advantage of the CIDOC /CRM [4] semantic framework, specifically conceived for the CH domain. The process of identifying the domain concepts has been carried out by the archaeological partners of the project; they also came to an agreement concerning the semantics to be assigned to the adopted terminology. Following this approach, it has been possible to address the problem related to the semantic heterogeneity of the data sources. The semantic layer also provides a uniform access point to all the digital archives integrated in the system. It must be pointed out that, at the moment, the integrated data sources are only the ones managed by relational DBMS. In order to interface the system with different databases, we establish a correspondence between the relations defined in the database schema and the conceptual model. In this way, the system can determine how the ontology entities are represented in the database and how to access them. The process we adopted to carry out this mapping is articulated according to the following three steps: 1. Definition of the correspondence between each relation in the database schema and a class of the ontology (whenever possible). 2. For each relation considered in the previous step, definition of the correspondence between the attributes of the relation and a class of the ontology (whenever possible). 3. By using the class properties, generation of the links from the class related to a given relation to the classes representing the relation's attributes. The information describing these correspondences is recorded by the ontology itself. The domain data represents the basic building blocks from which the narrations are composed. A narration can be related to a specific piece of data stored in the archives, i.e. an artefact exhibited in a museum, a tomb, a historical personage related to the Etruscan civilization, or it can be related to a more generic topic, such as the evolution of agriculture, the contact with the Greeks civilization. Because the concept of narration itself is defined by the ontology, it is possible to write narrations
concerning other narrations. Narrations are stored in the ontology, with all the references to the objects. Therefore, data is not replicated in the semantic layer, but it is left in the databases. Our approach to the data management and representation of the semantics enhances the narration management and increases its flexibility. The system can automatically update the data associated with a narration in case the database content is altered. For example, if a narration refers a class of objects, i.e. the bucchero pottery, it will be associated with all the objects of that kind currently listed in the system’s databases. If a new archive of bucchero pottery is integrated in the system, it will be referred by that narration, without any need to modify the ontology.
4.3 Narration Engine All the system’s functionalities are provided by the Narration Engine (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. The T.Arc.H.N.A. system architecture. It supports all the activities concerning the management of the narrations and the access to the digital archives integrated in the system. It includes three main components. The Content Query Generator manages the interaction with the database(s) storing the information of the domain. It provides the other system’s components with a uniform interface to all the integrated digital archives. It accepts requests expressed in terms of the concepts of the semantic model and translates them into SQL (Structured Query Language) statements that can be processed by the specific DBMS. It is thus possible to access the domain data without worrying about its actual representation in the specific database schema. The translation is carried out by means of the mapping information included in the ontology. The Content Query Generator collects the result and returns them to the clients. The Narration Builder supports the domain experts in the creation and management of the narration. Through the Narration Builder interface, the user can select the subjects of the narration to edit. The author can select from the digital archives the objects of interest by browsing the entities defined in the semantic model and specifying proper values for their properties. The resulting request is expressed in terms of the ontology’s concepts; therefore, no knowledge concerning the archive’s organization is required from the user. The request is then forwarded to the Content Query Generator which is responsible to translate it in
executable SQL code. All the retrieved references are then displayed back to the author, who can bookmark the objects he wants to associate with the narration. The Narration Query Manager provides the interface through which the VW applications can access the narration repository. It is the only system’s component visible to them. The Narration Query Manager retrieves the text of the narration and all available information concerning the items referred by the narration, if any. As usually, the access to the digital archives is mediated by the Content Query Generator.
5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS In this paper we have discussed the motivations underlying the development of interactive systems supporting museum visitors in accessing and understanding information in different contexts. A context characterized by the user profile, the technological, physical and social features of the environment, the history and information content distinguishing the interaction processes. Information items linked together according to associative and semantic links result in a large number of possible “information trails”, that we refer to as narrations. Each narration corresponds to an author’s line of thought, but by following different narrations a user can see the information from different perspectives. Authors and users of this information can rely on a shared understanding or terminology composing our CH domain. Future work is addressed to extend the mapping between our knowledge base, represented as an ontology, and the data sources in order to integrate not only relational databases but also textual and XML documents. Concerning the museum installation we have discussed about the need to design systems able to adapt on the basis of the user profiles and the context of use, without distracting the visitors but accompany them during the visit, thus adding value to their social and cultural experience. We are currently investigating other types of visiting styles able to offer interfaces aware of the context of use. Ubiquitous and pervasive computers embody the idea of computing available everywhere and accessible in a natural way thought the use of natural interaction techniques. The main problem is how to support a flexible and customizable visit for each user according to what she/he wants to see and how to balance between user controllable applications and automatically adapting systems. Possible solutions can be built by associating locations and RFID (radio frequency identification) or Bluetooth tagged objects with maps, mobile devices like cell phone or PDA or by simply being able to understand user movements or behaviours. However whatever the adopted interaction technology is, the architecture of the system based on our T.Arc.H.N.A. model, does not change. The content to present and to adapt according the context of use is retrieved from the same knowledge domain and accessed using the same techniques of inference. Note that in the paper we discussed only VW which enhance the visit of a museum. However, the same model can also be used to support access to information distributed on a territory (think of a city in which a user can built her/his customized tour based on the narrations specified by experts in the area of history, arts, and tourism) as well as to create a network of museums in which narrations are used to restore artefacts today distributed in several museums in their whole context and anthropological meaning.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been partially founded by the European Community under the T.Arc.H.N.A. project (Culture2000 program). Special thanks are due to Stefano Caselli for implementing the system for the National Museum of Tarquinia.
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