A New Paradigm for Constructing Children-Oriented Web-sites of Art Museums

The paper describes the central ideas of a new approach to creating Web-sites of art museums; it is proposed to take into account the peculiarities of the child’s cognitive-emotional sphere for constructing children-oriented Web-sites of art museums. The idea is that usual Web-sites are created to inform the users, to display the treasures, to show the gems of the collections in order to attract the attention of the audience. The way information is provided is based on the expected background of the possible users and on possible motivation. In case of children, everything is different: information acquisition is to be based on strong interest. It means that the child should be struck by the vision, then be emotionally touched and have enough time for establishing links between the images already existing in his/her conceptual picture of the world and new, just found images. In respond, the child will positively or negatively react to the acquired piece of information and inscribe his/her interpretation of the new found vision into his/her conceptual system, including his/her estimation of the vision. The significance of such Web-sites for creating cognitive foundations of sustainable development and the role of natural language interfaces are discussed.