Design, information organisation and the evaluation of the Virtual Museum of the Pacific digital ecosystem

Abstract

This paper reports on the design, organisation and evaluation of a Semantic Web application designed to deliver a collaborative tagging and navigation system for a digital online museum. The key technical features of our application—called the Virtual Museum of the Pacific—centre on a browsing and retrieval interface based on formal concept analysis, query-extension for text search over a concept lattice, an extensible distributed data model to support collaborative tagging and its Web Services implementation. The objective of the project was to provide a practical demonstrator of an formal concept analysis-based system for browsing museum content, while reporting on its impact to the organisational environment and its relevance among stakeholder groups. This paper presents its key design features, an analysis of our collaboration with the Australian Museum and the results of two independent requirements gathering and usability evaluation sessions.