Personalizing Museum Exhibition by Mediating Agents

We have proposed Meta-Museum as a new knowledge sharing environment where experts and novices can communicate with each other with agent support. Museum exhibitions are thought to be well organized representations of the expert knowledge of curators, but they are just one example of structures of knowledge among many possibilities, given to museum visitors in a one-sided way. Therefore, traditional museum exhibitions can hardly meet the vast requirements of general visitors who possess a variety of interests. In this paper, we propose agents to mediate between curators and visitors, so that both sides can convey their interests and knowledge to one another and gain a better understanding. These mediating agents visualize the semantic relations of displays as a two-dimensional spatial structure based on the viewpoints of the curators and visitors separately, and then together. The structures reflect the interests of the visitors, while maintaining the knowledge of the curators.