MUSiCAL: An object-oriented hypermedia data model for the reuse of museum information for computer-aided learning and the World-Wide Web

Abstract

As museum databases are computerized, a rich and extensive resource that could be reused to create World Wide Web pages and computer-aided learning materials is being created. This reuse can be facilitated using a complex set of views of museum data for many different contexts and applications. This paper presents MUSiCAL, a data model and methodology for the structuring and encoding of all types of museum information to do this. This model supports all museum uses of the information, and the retrieval and manipulation of this material by computer aided learning and World Wide Web authors. In this model, museum information is stored as distinct units called entity-objects, which capture all information relating to an object, person, place or company. Novel hypermedia techniques (called layers and wrappers) are used to create varied abstractions of the entity-objects for different users and uses. Material is stored in a context independent manner, but context sensitive views can be created, allowing units of information to be connected together in more than one contextual view. These structures facilitate the organisation and retrieval of objects and create a varied range of abstractions to help support reuse.