KORE: A Multi-Agent System to Assist Museum Visitors

This paper describes a research project aiming at realizing a personal electronic guide for a museum visitor. The basic idea is to provide the visitor with the information regarding the work of art she/he is currently looking at. To this aim, we designed a multi-agent architecture, called KORE , which, given that the visitor is equipped with a handheld device (i.e. a Java-enabled PDA or cellular phone), is able to recognize her/his position, in the museum, and the picture, sculpture, etc. she/he is looking at; on this basis, KORE can provide her/him with the information needed to better understand the peculiarities of the work of art, the characteristics of the author, the historical period, etc. Information is suitably filtered and adapted by KORE on the basis of the “user profile” of the visitor.