Virtual Museums on the Information Superhighway: Prospects and Potholes

Museum labels are written according to the assumed knowledge and needs of a single restricted audience model. However, each visitor has unique reasons for visiting a museum or for being attracted to a particular exhibit. In addition, each visitor has unique knowledge, abilities, needs and limitations. In order to make labels more informative, interesting and useful to the individual visitor, labels must become dynamic; that is, a label must be able to be different things to different people, according to their needs. In this paper, we describe the use of natural language generation technology in the construction of personalised virtual museum labels which are constructed on-the-fly by a system with a specific person’s needs in mind. The key point here, is that the description of a museum object can automatically adapt to the individual user. We call the result of this technology DYNAMIC HYPERTEXT. We highlight the benefits which arise from using this approach in the domain of museums: labels can be tailored more precisely to an individual's needs and background, not only in terms of the links to other interesting items in the museum, but more importantly, the descriptions of items themselves can be tailored to the user, thus making their visit a far more interesting and rewarding experience.