A distributed framework for digital museum exhibitions
Résumé
A digital museum designer implements the virtual exhibitions using digital images, web pages, animation, video clips, and other multimedia gadgets. Although there is no space and related limitations in the cyber world, there are other factors that a digital designer needs to consider. For instance, the bandwidth that is available to different users can vary tremendously. Attention span is another factor. While an adult may be willing to go through long explanations in text, a child may prefer graphic-intensive slideshows. Furthermore, the sophistication of users should also be considered. An expert and a novice apparently will expect different experiences when browsing through a digital museum. With the flexibility allowed to the digital form of media presentation, a digital museum should try to accommodate as many different user needs as possible. And a user, when browsing through an exhibition, can simply click and choose the style most suitable. While most people might agree that such a multi-style exhibition scheme for different users is desirable, there are not so many such exhibitions on the Web today. The reason is that using current techniques, each style of the same exhibition needs to be constructed separately. For online exhibitions involving video, animation, or SMIL -based shows, the realization of an exhibition scenario usually requires tedious multimedia composing, and is thereby very time-consuming. It is also quite cumbersome to modify the information content afterwards. If an online exhibition uses mainly HTML-based web pages, the resulting pages are relatively easy to compose, but they are also tight up with the visual art design and are thereby difficult to be modified by the content-provider alone. Furthermore, once the information content grows to a significant amount, the ? hyperlinks? Between associated exhibitions web pages are difficult to track and maintain. The second problem with the handcrafted online exhibition approach is that the content can only be presented to the user in a fixed presentation style. Since the Web users may have different multimedia and bandwidth capacities, it is difficult to design a one-size-fit-all exhibition. In the literature, while large and coordinated efforts have focused on standardizing media formats, providing shared access to museum databases, and developing search mechanisms for data retrieval, little emphasis is placed on designing mechanisms for turning the digitised museum collection into educational experiences for users. Our goal is to design an optimal solution for building online digital museum exhibitions.