A Semantic Approach to Designing Information Services for Smart Museums

The existing wide spectrum of embedded, multimedia, and mobile equipment provides an effective base for making museums smart or intelligent. By using the Internet of Things technology and the smart spaces paradigm the distance can be shortened between exhibits and their descriptive information on one side and consumers and providers of this information on the other side. In this paper, the authors discuss a smart museum concept and present a semantic approach to design of advanced information services for smart museums. The central point is introduction of the semantic layer to create a semantic network. The proposed approach reduces the semantic layer development to the following components: software infrastructure, semantic layer ontology, and mobile user access. For these components the authors provide design solutions, which are analyzed in respect to particular services for the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. The semantic approach can be applied to development of many museum services as well as in various digital environments of museums and cultural heritage areas.