Geographical Presentation of Virtual Museum Exhibitions

In this paper we present a system, called GeoARCO, which enables presentation of virtual museum exhibitions in a geographical context. The system is partially based on the results of the European project ARCO — Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects, which has developed technology for museums enabling them to create and manage virtual museum exhibitions for use in interactive kiosk displays and on the Web. GeoARCO uses the Google Earth platform to enable presentation of digital artefacts as well as complete cultural heritage exhibitions on top of the 3D globe model. Users can browse and search available exhibitions, display current location of objects as well as historical data about the objects, such as the place where the objects were made or discovered. A user can also display detailed 3D models of artefacts, reconstructed sites or entire virtual exhibitions. The system cooperates with multiple ARCO databases run by different museums.