The Digital Online Museum: A new Approach to Experience Virtual Heritage

This paper describes a novel approach to satisfy the needs of museum’s website visitors with a unique experience that cannot be reproduced in the museum itself. We aim at providing a continuous and lasting experience, without the emphasis of a single, final result a process we call digital strolling. The view supports this process by displaying results as a path on which the user strolls. To enable the user to find new and unexpected inspiration, recommendations to related exhibits are proposed in different dimensions to vary the user’s path. The common approach of image retrieval as the sole method to generate recommendations of related exhibits is not sufficient. Authored tagging is still the better but more costly solution. The proposed approach claims to fill the gap between current digital museums and the needs of the digital museums’ visitors.