Museum24

Museum24 is a project that aims to make culture and history information available and more attractive to all people interested - teachers and students, scientists, culture and history fans but also regular citizens.

As we live in the age of computers and information technology, it was decided to build a new Internet-based system that will support objectives of this project. A system, that will provide users with powerful tools and new interface to be able to easily search and navigate in culture and history related information. Our company, as a technical partner of this project, has accepted the task to build such system.

Short history

This project was originally initiated in cooperation with museums and government of Central Finland. Our company became a technical partner of this project and our goal was to develop the system in 2004-2005 and take care about its operation. Using our own resources together with support of EU, we have build a pilot project - www.museo24.fi for the region of Central Finland. Based on this pilot project, we have created a system with the same name - Museum24.

What is it about

Museum24 is a system that stores and organizes information about cultural and historical subjects and allows (if desired) its publishing on-line.

It introduces a new subject based approach. Every virtual or real object such as museum item, gallery picture, event, place, person or thing in history may be entered into the system and given an unique identifier. Using this identifier, any subject maybe be related with additional information material (such as articles, documents, images, videos, sounds) and also any other subjects. This way an easy navigable network of objects represented in the system is created.

This system may be build on existing museum (or gallery, archive) database to provide a completely new view on the information contained within. It also allows to easily build mutual relations, that were not possible before, or had to be hard-coded. This way, the system maybe used to make the museum information available to public in Internet, but it can also be also easily modified to be used as intranet system for catalogizing and documentation of museum collections and items.

Standards

Museum24 has been developed with interoperation with existing and future systems in mind. For this reason, we decided to base it on CIDOC CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model), which is a widely discussed and promising standard for describing cultural heritage items. As one of the goals of our system was representation of information within, we also included (optional) support for multimedia by incorporating MPEG-7 standard.

Technology

The backbone of the Museum24 system is based on technologies of Semantic web, namely OWL language and related tools. The OWL language is behind all the data present in Museum24 system. For storage of information, it currently uses powerful relational SQL databases PostgreSQL and MySQL. However, the system may be easily adapted to virtually any SQL database and it was designed also with support for multimedia databases in mind.

Related links:

CIDOC CRM
Museum24 Finland
Conference: Digital Semantic Content accross Cultures