Abstract

The integration between information technologies and cultural heritage can impact on everyday life, both from the point of view of institutions and of users. The cultural heritage community have recently been attracted by the chance offered by information technology, and, in particular, by the possibility of making cultural information available to a wide range of people. Museums, exhibitions and cultural institutions can now supply new services to access cultural information, and this calls for suitable infrastructures and tools. In such a context, this paper proposes a Web-based application that enables virtual visits to access cultural information tailored on the basis of user profiles and devices. The application is closely integrated within the Web; it also permits one group to build up virtual visits that can be attended by different people interested in the same subject. The application is based on an infrastructure exploiting innovative technologies such as active proxy servers and mobile agents; it grants a high degree of flexibility and is particularly suitable for an improved promulgation of cultural information.

Author Keywords: Web application; Virtual visit; Cultural heritage; Agent

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. The PROOF infrastructure

2.1. The framework and the application modules

2.2. The mobile agents and their coordination

3. Virtual visits

3.1. The application architecture

3.2. The VVM application at work

3.3. Data representation

3.4. User interface and resource displaying

3.5. Group visits

3.6. Technical details

3.7. Usability

4. Related work

5. Conclusions and future work

Acknowledgements

References