Duration: 01/02/2001 – 31/07/2003
Funding: sponsored under the Europeans Commission’s 5th Framework (FP5-IST-2000-26074)

 

MESMUSES aims at designing and experimenting a "geographic" metaphor for organising, structuring and presenting the scientific and technical knowledge offered to the public by scientific museums. The metaphor is the one of knowledge maps, which all together create and offer a cartography of connected or neighbouring knowledge domains. These maps will enable the creation of semantic portals through which users will easily locate information relevant to their current interest, and from which they will navigate either on predefined itineraries, or on new routes that they will choose freely on the map. The same knowledge structure will also facilitate management and reuse of information assets by producers, e.g. museum staff preparing supporting content for a temporary exhibition.

The objectives of the project are:

  • to establish and validate a methodology and related tools for Scientific Knowledge Cartography (SKC) based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a W3C standard, hence enabling knowledge exchange between various organisations, and cooperative development of ontologies;
  • to choose and experiment tools for creating "itineraries" on the knowledge landscape, to orient museum visitors through a real physical exhibition or a virtual one;
  • to design personalisation methods which will offer different itineraries on the same knowledge domains to the different categories of visitors, from the very young or elderly people, to university scholars, experimenting dynamic re-routing of the visitor from an itinerary to another according to his queries or requests.