Designing and Implementing Museum Exhibitions on the Semantic Web

Abstract

The increasing adoption of the Semantic Web vision has led to the emergence of a distributed knowledge base in the form of interconnected ontologies. In the context of cultural heritage in particular, digital museums that use Semantic Web standards and technologies, hereafter called Semantic Web museums, have been proposed. Current Semantic Web museums, however, support mostly static exhibitions, meaning exhibitions based on static narrative structures. By contrast, this thesis proposes a new kind of Semantic Web museum that also supports dynamic exhibitions, meaning exhibitions based on narrative structures that change dynamically during to the user’s interaction. Apart from Semantic Web technologies, the proposals of this thesis are based on ideas from narrative theories and interactive storytelling systems. More specifically, the thesis proposes a theoretical framework for building Semantic Web museums, which provides facilities of increasing complexity, including presentation schemata, transitions between presentation schemata, and narrative functions. An experimental prototype of the proposed framework was also implemented during the thesis, and it was used to demonstrate how the framework supports the creation of Semantic Web museums with different types of end-user interaction.