A Method of Designing Museum Services Handling System for Ubiquitous Visitors

Abstract

Advances in mobile computing technologies have enabled the personal ubiquitous computing environment for ubiquitous visitors. In the case of museum services, a ubiquitous visitor is free to access his/her interested exhibit information and personalized services anywhere, any time through any possible mobile or fixed devices without making the explicit requests. However, often due to locations, availability of time, levels of understandings, devices, etc., museum ubiquitous visitors have dynamic requirements of services. Moreover, a wide variety of services and an increasing amount of information is overwhelming for the museum ubiquitous visitors. The designing of the museum service handling system makes a promising effort to cater to the dynamic requirements of the ubiquitous visitors and to mitigate the information overloading problem. The system essentially tailors to the requirements of the ubiquitous visitors, which need a different set of components to configure the required services.

The objective of the thesis is to design the museum service handling system to cater to the individual requirements of the ubiquitous visitors. The system is designed to provide exhibit information museum services for the ubiquitous visitors. The proposed system obtains the ubiquitous visitor’s context information and their interests to design a museum ubiquitous visitor model. By adapting the ubiquitous visitor model, the museum service handling system first identifies the URLs of required exhibit information and later examines the ubiquitous visitor’s dynamic requirements such as the available time, present devices, etc., to provide appropriate exhibit information. The designing of the system is presented as follows.

We present context information of the museum ubiquitous visitors to identify the required services for the visitors. We use the procedure of Context Information-Constructs (CI-Constructs) to acquire the physical environment context information, visitor activity context information, and network context Information. Further, context information is processed in two’s, three’s, and in higher combinations to formulate Composite Context (CC) and Essential Context-derived Reasons (ECR). ECR is further used to provide required services to the museum ubiquitous visitors. We design the museum ubiquitous visitor model to provide personalized services to the ubiquitous visitors. To design the model, museum ubiquitous visitor’s interest is extracted by analysing the history of previously accessed exhibit information museum services. Moreover, Visitor Personal Information (VPI) is obtained through the pre-visit registration process. Further, ECR, Interests, and VPI of the museum ubiquitous visitors are combined to design the ubiquitous visitor model. The proposed model characterizes the multifaceted information about the ubiquitous visitors which enables the system to provide personalized services. We propose the organization of museum exhibit information to cater to the individual requirements of the ubiquitous visitors. The Introductory Attributes (IA), Functional/Behavioural Attributes (F/BA), and Descriptive Attributes (DA) which broadly characterize the exhibit information are identified and used to organize the exhibit information. The exhibit information is organized as essential information and further as elaborated information at the level of school kids, college students, and professionals ubiquitous visitors. We propose the system of identifying and providing museum services to cater to the required services to the ubiquitous visitors. The system is designed to provide exhibit information museum services to the ubiquitous visitors. The system, based upon the ubiquitous visitor model, first identifies the required exhibit information URLs. Later, according to the dynamic requirements of the ubiquitous visitors, the system provides tailored exhibit information to the visitors. The case study is presented with a variety of context information and interests to provide exhibit information museum services to the ubiquitous visitors. The museum environment is simulated with a wide variety of exhibits and for the dynamic requirements of the ubiquitous visitors. The simulation results show that the proposed system significantly reduces the time to identify and provide required exhibit information museum services for the ubiquitous visitors. In summary, we have presented: i) Museum ubiquitous visitors context information; ii) Museum ubiquitous visitor model; iii) Organization of museum exhibit information; iv) The system of identifying and providing museum services for the ubiquitous visitors. We have simulated the museum environment in different possible scenarios. The results obtained in the simulation show the effectiveness of the proposed system in handling exhibit information museum services for the ubiquitous visitors.