Context Driven Information Systems for Museum Visitors

The growth in wireless and mobile communications technologies is facilitating the development of a new range of location based information services. Such services offer many new opportunities for organisations such as museums who are constantly striving to improve their overall visitor experience. There is considerable interest in the use of location based services to track visitors as they move around a museum gallery such that information can be delivered that adds value to the exhibit on view. In addition exhibit information can be personalised to the visitor using aspects of their context that relate to their museum visit. In this paper we present an architecture for the development of a context driven information system that is to be deployed within a new “Manchester Communicates” gallery at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. This paper also reviews previous research into context driven systems, carried out at the University of Salford, that formed the foundations of this new system.