iMuseum: A scalable context-aware intelligent museum system

0140-3664/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2008.05.004 * Corresponding author. Address: School of Com Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi 710072, P.R. C fax: +81 075 753 7480. E-mail addresses: [email protected] ( (X. Zhou), [email protected] (Z. Yu), jhpark1 [email protected] (J. Ma). A context-aware intelligent museum system can capture the information of the visitor and surroundings, recognize the visitor’s purpose, and then assist visiting in themuseum. It is noted that not only the devices in the museum cannot be easily predicted, but the available applications may change over time. Therefore infinite entities anddynamic context knowledge arenecessarilymanagedbya systemwithgood scalability. This paper proposes a scalable context-aware intelligent museum system called iMuseum. The system is based on a new context model, 2*3CM (2 Sets and 3 Layers ContextModel) that integrates the advantages of ontology-basedmodel and hierarchical model. The iMuseum system has two novel features: distributed acquisition of context knowledge on demand and centralized sharing of context knowledge with doublerepository. With the two mechanisms, the system is able to support defining new concepts, synthesizing high-level context, and querying application-oriented context at run-time. As a result, the third parties can independently develop their own applications or context providers, and also add or end them optionally. The preliminary experimental results have demonstrated the scalability and acceptance of the system. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.