UBIQUITOUS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CONTEXTUALISED EXHIBITION SERVICES

1st Supervisor: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Schrader

2nd Supervisor: Dr. Marcus Specht

The ubiquitous computing field is evolving rapidly. Its applications are penetrating everyday situations. Furthermore, the increasing demand on personalisation and customisation is calling for new means of providing content and services to the users based on the user’s own specific context. Museums and exhibitions, which form an integral part of the cultural heritage of society, are seeing increasing demands for contextualised exhibition services at every stage of the museum experience i.e. before, during and after a museum visit. Contextualisation aims to elicit a more engaging experience in order to enrich visitors’ learning and enjoyment. Moreover, technological support for exploration, explanation, and communication are needed to support museums’ essential functions, particularly, interpretation and exhibition. In this research thesis, a novel infrastructure, called Medient Infrastructure is designed, implemented and evaluated. The main results, usage showcases and a demo scenario for the Holstentor museum in Lübeck, called "Holstentour”, will be demonstrated to outline the infrastructure’s design, which is realised based on Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture and an Event-driven approach. The design considers easy and flexible deployment in complex exhibition scenarios. Moreover, one of the main design goals is minimizing the required infrastructure and installation procedures, hence, visitors can use their personal mobile devices easily and effectively. Furthermore, museums are free to design their own mobile and stationary context-aware applications. Basic, advanced and environmental context information is gathered to support a ubiquitous museum information environment to support multimedia content delivery on Bluetooth-enabled and AJAX supported mobile devices, whereby Ubiquitous Learning can be supported in museum environments. Finally, the system’s approach is focusing on museums for the first pilot prototype. For future work, other environments such as the university campus, hospitals, etc will be tested against the proposed approach.