THE MINERVA SYSTEM: A STEP TOWARD AUTOMATICALLY CREATED VIRTUAL MUSEUMS

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to cultural heritage yields new technological solutions for the fruition of museums and art exhibitions. In this article we present a version of the Minerva system, able to support the organization of virtual museums by cooperating with curators to set a collection of works of art in an environment. This new version organizes a part of the archeological finds belonging to the collection of the Archeological Museum of Milan. The role of Minerva is not to substitute the curators but to assist them in setting up a museum or an art exhibition. In this perspective, Minerva carries out automatically some tasks involved in museum organization and constitutes a unique system among those oriented to cultural heritage. The experimental activities have been conducted in cooperation with archeological experts who validated the results produced by Minerva.