An Agent-Based Architecture for Museum Visitors' Guide Systems

Recent developments in museum visitors' guides focus on context awareness, personalization and multimodal and multimedia information presentation to individuals and groups of visitors. However, the modern museum is becoming an "Active Museum", which is a special example of an active environment that interacts with its inhabitants. Since recent museum visitors' guides have focused more on the application and less on the system architecture and infrastructure, much effort is now being invested in the preparation of infrastructure that will support the specific research application. This work focuses on the architecture of the "Active Museum" as demonstrated by two research projects on museum visitors' guides, and suggests a generic, layered architecture for such systems. Such architecture would facilitate research cooperation and increase its effectiveness, and also serve later as a basis for the development of museum visitors' guides.