A MOBILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPED FOR ART MUSEUMS:

CONCEPTUAL MODEL AND ARCHITECTURE

M. Lozano, R. Tesoriero J. A. Gallud and V. M. R. Penichet

Laboratory of User Interaction and Software Engineering

Department of Computer Systems, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

Keywords: Mobile devices, PDA, Art Museums, usability.

Abstract: Mobile devices as smart phones or PDA are common devices in our daily life. Museums and art galleries

are provided with some electronic guides in order to do more pleasant the visit to the exhibition. Our

research group has been working in designing and developing mobile software for art museums based on

PDA. The problem studied in this paper is to prove the suitableness of using PDA instead of the traditional

electronic guides. It is interesting to know how to use these devices as a medium to guide and improve the

visitors’ experience. Before presenting the components of our solution we introduce the important items and

concepts by means of our conceptual model.

1 INTRODUCTION

Museums used to offer visitors some mediums to

guide and enjoy the visit. These electronic guides are

an item with audio facilities in several languages. It

permits users to be informed about pieces of the

museum even in several languages.

In this paper we suggest a new way of interaction

instead of using old communication systems, but

new technology. Then, we thought about a system in

which people could interact in many ways. The

system we have developed is completely available to

visitors, who can rent a pocket computer (PDA) in

the museum (Gallud, 2005), the Museum of Cutlery

of Albacete (Spain).

The system running in the museum can manage

its visits, public news and events in its Web page, to

provide restricted information for determined expert

people, to sell items on-line. Pieces can be managed

and catalogued with multimedia information (audio,

video, image, text…) and displayed in portable

devices such as PDA’s or tablet PC’s with

portability warranty in the applications.

A first task before designing the system is the

definition of the conceptual model of a museum.

What are the items we should consider common to

all museums? How do we can define a scalable and

modular system?

The paper follows describing in section 2 some of

the most relevant previous works in this field.

Section 3 introduces our proposal about the

conceptual model of a museum. Section 4 shows the

definition of our first system and the evolution to the

today’s system is showed in section 5. Finally, the

conclusions and future work is presented in section

2 ART AND TECHNOLOGY

The application of new technologies in museums is

not a new topic. There are several experiences that

work in real cases with success. Technology is used

to provide visitors with the ability of interacting with

the museum. In a typical scenario, the visitor can use

his or her sense of touch (hearing and sight) to learn

about the subject of the exhibition. Multimedia

devices, 3D sound, DVD and other systems are

employed to do people enjoy in the museum.

In this project we focused on the use of pocket

computers (PDA) as a powerful tool to help visitors

in their visit to the museum. The challenge was to

find out if our system be a new barrier or a helpful

tool in the museum, if the PDA technology would be

useful to artist and their work of arts, if there are

reasons for museums to avoid adopting new

advanced technology. They are not questions easy to

469

Lozano M., Tesoriero R., A. Gallud J. and M. R. Penichet V. (2007).

A MOBILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPED FOR ART MUSEUMS: CONCEPTUAL MODEL AND ARCHITECTURE.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 469-474

DOI: 10.5220/0001292404690474

 SciTePress

answer reading former works, so we decided to

define our conclusions building a complete system.

Before beginning our project we should take a

look to previous works. There are several former

projects that have tried to use wearable computers in

museums. One of the most important references in

this subject is the work developed by Ciavarella and

Paternò (Ciavarella 2003 and 2004) in the Marble

Museum of Carrara (Italy). This project is currently

working and offers to users a PDA with all the

information preloaded by means of memory cards.

The PDA is able to detect when the user is entering

in a new room thanks to infrared devices located at

the beginning of each room.

Other Museums have already developed projects

based on handled devices (Steele, 2002), as the Field

Museum in Chicago, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of

Art of New York or Kew Gardens outside London.

Most of them use handled devices as a useful tool in

the inventory process (see references). These

projects are all prototypes and normal visitors do not

use any PDA.

The exhibitions are ideal scenarios for applying

augmented reality or mixed reality. There are many

HCI groups working in this area, as the work of

Ciolfi (Ciolfi et al, 2002) where an interactive

museum exhibit is designed using or the work

performed by Bernt Schiele (Schiele et al, 2001)

where a wearable computer is developed as an

alternative to the traditional guides.

3 CONCEPTUAL MODELING OF

A MUSEUM

One of the first tasks relating the design of mobile

software for museums is to define the conceptual

model.

In this section we try to answer the question

“what is a museum?” We would like to combine the

most general and abstract view together with the

particular case of the Cutlery Museum of Albacete.

We think a museum is conceptually composed

by, at least, two types of information:

• Catalogue information

• Environmental information

Catalogue information is related to museum

registry. Information is stored according to defined

structures and procedures that museums should

follow to accomplish international standards

(Carretero, 1996) (ICOM-CIDOC, 1995). Usually,

this information is described in technical language,

and it should be adapted to visitors. It is also usually

available in electronic format. So, and we are not

going to board this type of information in this

article, although we provide a mechanism to provide

extra information adapted to pieces.

We are focused on defining a model to represent

information that surrounds piece instead of the piece

itself. We called this information environmental

information. A piece being exposed is wrapped by

extra information that depends on exposition

environment; for example piece physical place. So, a

central item of our model is the Space. An art object

must be exposed into a Space and the object has a

Space associate to itself.. Pieces are usually exposed

into a container, for instance a show. A show may

represent a showcase, a frame in case of a painting,

or anything that is able to contain a piece. A Space

has a graphical representation, an associated

resource and an identifier.

The interesting point here is that the Identifier

entity allows the system to be isolated from the

specific technology used to locate the object in the

real space (RFID, WIFI, etc).

Besides, an object may be identified by one or

more Identifiers. So it is possible to use different

position and location technologies at the same time

to improve system precision. For instance, you can

use RFID to identify a showcase and a code bar to

identify a piece into identified showcase.

Although a museum may have a media

repository associated to its catalogue, extra

information about pieces should be provided in order

to present / adapt information to visitors.

Media and content exposed to visitors may

differ from museum technical information. So this

information should be related to museum pieces.

Pieces are not the only spaces that may have

information related. Often, spaces provide

contextual information about pieces contained in

them.

Information described on previous paragraph is

represented by resources. So art objects may be

associated to different resource media, for instance;

images, audios, videos or text. Media should also be

customized in different languages.

A museum is a cultural environment which may

be physically organized in one or more buildings. A

building is divided into floors and a floor is divided

into rooms. In a room we can find terminals. A

terminal represents a device that can be place into a

room. It can be a show or panel.

Museums usually have information about pieces

catalogued. Pieces are exhibited in shows.

However, there is some information that is not

catalogued; this information is provided to visitors

through panels. Sometimes large shows are divided

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into regions to organize pieces in groups to improve

information understanding. So, each region is

represented by a section that groups pieces that are

related in some way. As consequence, pieces can be

contextualized according to defined criteria,

providing a context for each group of pieces.

Pieces are physically represented by a physical

representation (PieceRepresentation) that relates the

physical place of the piece to piece information.

The only linking point between catalogue

information and environmental information is

PieceRepresentation and Piece.

So, we decouple piece physical representation

(PieceRepresentation) from piece technical

information (Piece). PieceRepresentation acts as a

Adapter to a concrete piece, providing additional

information related to environment. This

characteristic provides us the ability to adapt the

model to any kind of pieces.

The GraphicRepresentation is the graphical

representation of a space. Each space is represented

in two ways:

1. Internally

2. Externally

Internal representation is used show the space

itself.

On the other hand, external representation is a

representation of the space from container space

point of view.

GraphicRepresentation is a medium to decuple

space graphical representation.

An overview of conceptual model is depicted on

Figure 1.

4 MOBILE SOFTWARE: FIRST

APPROACH

Two years ago, the first design of the system was

deployed in the Cutlery Museum. By that time there

were some critical aspects that had to be solved to

adopt a solution that affected the whole project

(software and hardware architecture and so on). In

our case, these critical aspects were: (some of them

would change in the following stages):

Timing: the most critical was the deadline for

realising a functional version of the system. We only

had six months. Positioning system: the first

definition of the system was simple.

The system could take advantage of user position

to retrieve information and minimize user

interaction. However, we decided not to use any

automatic positioning system because of the strict

deadline. Instead of using an automatic system, we

decided to employ a set of Museum maps. All

objects in the Museum have a reference to localize

the object in the system.

Identifier

CulturalSpace

Space

Building

Floor

Room

PanelShow

Section

PieceRepresentation

BarCodeLogicID PassiveRFIDActiveRFID

Piece

GraphicRepresentation

Terminal

Resource

Text

Audio

Video

Image

Language

Figure 1: Conceptual model of a museum.

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Location of the information: we decided to store

all the information in servers. All client computers

(desktop, laptop and PDA) request information from

the server through a wireless network. This decision

simplifies the maintenance tasks.

Technology to be used: This is another critical

aspect of the development process. We decided to

use a multi-technological approach, as it is described

below.

We divided the whole system in three

subsystems: the Web Subsystem, the Internal

Subsystem and the Mobile Subsystem.

The Museum Web Subsystem (MWS) consists of

a Web portal. This subsystem is described in

(Gallud, 2005).

The Museum Internal Subsystem (MIS) is used

to manage general information about pieces. Pieces

can be inserted, modified and removed from the

database with this subsystem.

One of the most interesting applications is the

Plan Manager. An administrator can load a map of a

floor of the building. Then he can place the

following items:

• Walls cannot contain anything and limit

spaces.

• Sections, rooms and zones allow to

classified pieces in the museum be

accommodated in one collection or in

another…

• Panels are used to represent windows and

pieces and can be placed in the same

position like reality.

Pieces were added to database and then an

administrator can take the pieces from the same

database and put them into the correct show window

or panel with the Plan Manager.

Every visitor can use a portable device, like a

PDA, and if he has installed the mobile subsystem,

he can interact with the system.

Another important subsystem is the Museum

Mobile Subsystem (MMS). Thanks to the MMS, a

visitor can view in a PDA, or in another portable

device provided with wireless connections,

additional details about the physical pieces that he is

watching in a show window, just by clicking in the

PDA.

All multimedia information (video, audio, text,

etc. in several languages) is taken from the database

server through the wireless network.

Besides, users can be warned if there is some

interesting thing in the room where they are placed,

or if there is an audiovisual exhibition or something

like that. Events and exhibitions are introduced from

the MIS described former.

5 ADDING NEW COMPONENTS

TO THE SYSTEM

When new functionality is going to be incorporated

in the system, problems like components reuse or

system scalability arise. If there are no components

reused or if the system can not be easily scaled, one

can conclude the initial system has not been well

designed. This is the situation we faced when we

decided to incorporate new functionality. And this

situation is easy to understand taking into account

the rigorous deadlines.

On the other hand, as the time the system was

released and deployed in the Cutlery Museum, we

began to receive users’ satisfaction evaluation and a

number of improvement suggestions.

The desired functionality for the system was

almost the same with the addition of the automatic

positioning of PDAs and the redefinition of the user

interface in order to provide a richer experience.

Additionally we had to integrate our solution with

the previous software running in a museum

(catalogue application).

Only our experience in mobile software for

museums was useful in the new system design but

we could not reuse any software component.

Anyway, experience is a degree.

In summary, we decided to redesign the system

in order to support PDA automatic positioning,

automatic database synchronization (from any

catalogue database to ours) and, the most important

issue is the user interface definition.

In this paper we are not going to describe the

research aspects devoted to improve the user

interface and the experience of visitors (with PDA)

in the Museum. We focus on functional

requirements affecting the architecture.

Two main requirements have been incorporated

in the definition of the system: the positioning

subsystem and the automatic database

synchronization subsystem. Other important

requirements were also taken into account in a lower

degree: modularity, technology independence and so

on.

The new components of the system are showed

in Figure 2.

The positioning subsystem is responsible for

giving the PDA a specific location according to a

reference system.

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Figure 2: Subsystem view.

The automatic database synchronization

subsystem is responsible for maintaining the

coherence between both the internal and external

databases.

Figure 3: Detailed components view.

As internal database we mean the database

eventually installed in the museum (usually the

catalogue and an eventual media repository).The

external database refers to our specific database for

supporting the positioning subsystem and the other

requirements.

Figure 3 shows a more detailed view of the new

system’s components. In the detailed view showed

in Figure 3 we can see the main components of the

system and the specific nodes hosting each

component.

Both systems share a common functionality

described as follows. A user with a PDA wants to

visit the museum and runs the specific software for

museums, in the entrance. In the first approach the

user had to locate his or her position in the virtual

map showed in the PDA. The new version of the

system introduces an improvement by which the

PDA is able to detect automatically the position of

the user in the museum.

The positioning system allows the system to

provide users with an unknown experience when

they are visiting an art museum.

From a technological point of view, we

considered the most relevant techniques to solve the

automatic positioning system, and up to date, we

have not closed the topic with a definitive

conclusion. We have considered using infrared,

RFID, WIFI and mixed approaches.

The variety of positioning systems forced us to

define the system separately from the hardware

employed. Figures 1 and 2 show how the client is

able to interact with the environment in order to

know its position in the real building. The client

program running on the PDA can receive

information from the environment in different ways:

infrared sensors, RFID tags, Bluetooth or WIFI

devices or whatever system available now or to

appear in the future.

Figure 2 shows other components running on

different nodes.

The person responsible to manage the art

exhibition uses the Space Manager program to

define spaces which will host art objects. The

concrete art object is managed by means a software

legacy. This software is supposed to reuse the

information the museum had before the introduction

of the mobile solution based on PDA.

To cope with information reuse the system

assumes the existence of software legacy that

introduces the need of a Synchronizer. The

Synchronizer maintains the coherence between

External database and Internal.

The Catalogue component is responsible for

accessing information belonging to internal

database. Relationship among art object information

that is not related to environment is solved by this

component.

Space administrator relates museum catalogue

information to environment information. This

information is usually structured and organized by

SpaceManager.

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The Contents Provider provides to the client with

the information to be showed. This information is

client independent because it is represented in XML

format and it can be easily read by most of devices.

So, information adaptation and communication is

managed by this component too.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we describe the components structure

of mobile software based on PDA applied to art

museums.

This research is based on the idea that a PDA or

pocket computer can be used in art museums to

improve the users’ experience.

The paper shows the conceptual model of a

museum that allows us to design generic software

for all kinds of museums. We have applied the

concepts to a particular museum, the Cutlery

Museum of Albacete (Spain).

The evolution of a real system has been

described from the initial requirements to the actual

ones. The most important requirement introduced in

this new version of the system is the introduction of

automatic positioning of PDA in the real building by

means of using the available technology (infrared,

RFID, etc).

The first version of the system was deployed in

the Cutlery Museum of Albacete two years ago and

has been visited by over 15.000 people.

The new system is being developed in the

LoUISE research group and will be deployed in

spring 2007.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the Spanish CICYT project

TIN2004-08000-C03-01 for funding this work,

which was also supported by the grant PCC-05-005-

1 from JCCM

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