Mo Músaem Fíorúil: A Web-Based Search and Information Service for Museum Visitors

We describe the prototype of an interactive, web-based, museum artifact search and information service. Mo Músaem F́ıorúil clusters and indexes images of museum artifacts taken by visitors to the museum where the images are captured using a passive capture device such as Microsoft’s SenseCam [1]. The system also matches clustered artifacts to images of the same artifact from the museums official photo collection and allows the user to view images of the same artifact taken by other visitors to the museum. This matching process potentially allows the system to provide more detailed information about a particular artifact to the user based on their inferred preferences, thereby greatly enhancing the user’s overall museum experience. In this work, we introduce the system and describe, in broad terms, it’s overall functionality and use. Using different image sets of artificial museum objects, we also describe experiments and results carried out in relation to the artifact matching component of the system.