A Semantic Approach to Enrich User Experience in Museums Through Indoor Positioning

摘要

This article presents a novel ontology aiming to connect an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) to Europeana, the European Union digital platform for cultural heritage. The main purpose of this system is to deliver information about Cultural Heritage Objects (CHO) to users navigating in museums, when they approach certain pieces of art. Although different semantic works have been previously published regarding the problem of finding optimal paths with IPS, the novelty of this work is the combination of indoor positioning and a semantic view of cultural objects. This ontology enriches the experience of users and offers a new way of enjoying art. The paper shows the effectiveness of the proposed ontology to connect a widely known database to a wireless positioning system. The potential of the developed method is shown using data obtained from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, one of the most important European art galleries, with more than six thousand master pieces listed in Europeana. Some experiments have been also carried out in the Old masters Museum, one of the constituent museums of the Royal Museums that is dedicated to European painters from the 15th to the 18th centuries.