Eoin Kilfeather

An environment for mobile context-based hypermedia retrieval

This paper proposes a novel solution to querying hyperlinked multimedia cultural heritage datasets based on the users context. Context in this sense is defined as the users location in virtual space and the particular mobile device being modeled together with user preferences or profile. The purpose is to automatically push relevant data from the database server to the client based on this comprehensive definition of the users context. Consideration in regard to which mobile device is currently being modeled is a primary filter for determining what data will be sent and in what format. For example, image data will not be sent to a mobile phone and video will not be sent to a PDA. The CHI (Cultural Heritage Interfaces) project differs from many of the models encountered on the Web in that its primary focus is not the accurate 3D rendering of a street/landscape, but the simulation of such a physical reality to explore the adaptive hypermedia paradigm in the context of a spatial navigation interface.

eGovernment for innovative cities of the next generation: The ICING Project

Abstract People can act as collectors of knowledge about the environments in which they find themselves. This knowledge is a valuable resource from which city administrations and other urban stakeholders would benefit if they were able to access it. However, citizens normally do not interact with their city other than to access basic information and to conduct financial transactions. In order to harness this unused, and often tacit, knowledge and make it explicit and available, the ICING (Innovative Cities for the Next Generation) project developed software and services to link citizens to their cities, using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The result is the ICING platform that allows people to use many different communication devices to both contribute information to and access services from their city and from their fellow citizens. A range of ICING services (which are delivered using the ICING platform) was developed in consultation with end users - both ordinary people and city councils themselves1 .

Using Event Spaces, Setting and Theme to Assist the Interpretation and Development of Museum Stories

Stories are used to provide a context for museum objects, for example linking those objects to what they depict or the historical context in which they were created. Many explicit and implicit relationships exist between the people, places and things mentioned in a story and the museum objects with which they are associated. We describe an interface for authoring stories about museum objects in which textual stories can be associated with semantic annotations and media elements. A recommender component provides additional context as to how the story annotations are related directly or via other concepts not mentioned in the story.

Storyscope: Supporting the authoring and reading of museum stories using online data sources

Museum staff tell stories to assist visitor interpretation of artworks. Visitors also tell their own stories to articulate their understanding and opinion of artworks. Additional knowledge about the concepts mentioned or tagged in these stories can be found from online data sources. These could be used to assist reader interpretation or author development of stories. However, the potentially vast network of heterogeneous knowledge that can be created around the tags or annotations of a story could be bewildering for the story reader or author. Here we present Storyscope, a test-bed environment for the authoring, reading and semantic annotation of museum stories. The integration of online knowledge within the task of story authoring or interpretation is facilitated by mapping the available knowledge to a set of facts and simple events related to each story annotation. Narrative principles of theme and setting are used to discover and highlight aspects of the knowledge of potential value to the author or reader. Preliminary studies indicate the potential of the approach for providing a form of semantic navigation across stories and concepts having a better cognitive fit to story related tasks than existing forms of navigation.

Storyscope: Using Setting and Theme to Assist the Interpretation and Development of Museum Stories

Stories are used to provide a context for museum objects, for example linking those objects to what they depict or the historical context in which they were created. Many explicit and implicit relationships exist between the people, places and things mentioned in a story and the museum objects with which they are associated. Storyscope is an environment for authoring museum stories comprising text, media elements and semantic annotations. A recommender component provides additional context as to how the story annotations are related directly or via other concepts not mentioned in the story. The approach involves generating a concept space for different types of story annotation such as artists and museum objects. The concept space of an annotation is predominantly made up of a set of events, forming an event space. The story context is aggregated from the concept spaces of its associated annotations. Narrative notions of setting and theme are used to reason over the concept space, identifying key concepts and time-location pairs, and their relationship to the rest of the story. The author or reader can use setting and theme to navigate the context of the story.