An XML-Based Customizable Model for Multimedia Applications for Museums and Exhibitions

Abstract

Inclusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and multimedia in a museum can result in a functional upgrade of the visitor experience in an exhibition. The added value of ICTs includes promoting the enhancement of educational, research, and entertainment purposes towards which a museum has already been designed. To better understand the potential role of ICTs in museums, the authors introduce an XML-based customizable system. In this chapter, they present an XML-based customizable multimedia solution for museums and exhibitions. The proposed approach serves multimedia content solutions for the assistance of visitors and researchers. A modular approach is adopted in order to provide a User Interface abstraction and operation-business logic isolation from the data. The key advantage of the proposed solution is the separation of concerns for User Interface, business logic, and data retrieval. The proposed solution allows the dynamic XML-based customization of museum multimedia applications to support additional data from new seasonal or one-time exhibitions at the same museum, re-arrangement of the exhibits in the museum halls, addition of new digitized halls with the respective multimedia data and any additional documentation or multimedia extras for existing exhibits. The authors present a case study at the digital exhibition for the history of the ancient Olympic Games at the Older Olympia Museum. Several hundreds of exhibits have been included and the dynamic management was successful after a careful digitization procedure. The results have been encouraging, the users and administrators’ feedback was positive, and the full-scale deployment was successful.