George Lepouras

Ontology visualization methods—a survey

Ontologies, as sets of concepts and their interrelations in a specific domain, have proven to be a useful tool in the areas of digital libraries, the semantic web, and personalized information management. As a result, there is a growing need for effective ontology visualization for design, management and browsing. There exist several ontology visualization methods and also a number of techniques used in other contexts that could be adapted for ontology representation. The purpose of this article is to present these techniques and categorize their characteristics and features in order to assist method selection and promote future research in the area of ontology visualization.

Virtual museums for all: employing game technology for edutainment

Museums have started to realise the potential of new technologies for the development of edutainment content and services for their visitors. Virtual reality technologies promise to offer a vivid, enjoyable experience to the museums guests, but the cost in time, effort and resources can prove to be overwhelming. In this paper, we propose the use of 3D game technologies for the purpose of developing affordable, easy to use and pleasing virtual environments. To this end, we present a case study based on an already developed version of a virtual museum and a newly implemented version that uses game technologies. The informal assessment indicates that game technologies can offer a prominent and viable solution to the need for affordable desktop virtual reality systems.

Barriers to Electronic Service Development

E-government initiatives have been proven to deliver significant benefits, both for suppliers of electronic services (public authorities and organizations) and for the public, to whom services are addressed. However, the pace with which electronic services are made available and adopted is lower than planned or expected; governments tend to be slow in releasing new services, and citizens often prefer to conduct business with the government through paper forms and physical presence, rather than using online methods. This indicates that certain barriers exist that hinder the transition to electronic services. In this paper, we present the results of a survey among electronic service stakeholder groups, to identify the most important barriers to electronic service development. Documentation of barriers is considered important, since administrations may take certain measures to overcome them. Hints on how specific barriers may be overcome are also provided.

Real exhibitions in a virtual museum

When creating a virtual environment open to the public a number of challenges have to be addressed. The equipment has to be chosen carefully in order to be be able to withstand hard everyday usage, and the application has not only to be robust and easy to use, but has also to be appealing to the user, etc. The current paper presents findings gathered from the creation of a multi-thematic virtual museum environment to be offered to visitors of real world museums. A number of design and implementation aspects are described along with an experiment designed to evaluate alternative approaches for implementing the navigation in a virtual museum environment. The paper is concluded with insights gained from the development of the virtual museum and portrays future research plans.

A game-engine based virtual museum authoring and presentation system

In this paper we present a system that facilitates virtual museum development and usage. The system is based on a game engine, ensuring thus minimal cost and good performance, and includes provisions that enable museum curators design the virtual museum without any specialized knowledge. Besides visual and auditory information, museum curators may also provide metadata which provide additional information to the visitor, while they can be also exploited for searching for exhibits with certain properties. A guide is also included in the museum, to present additional information to the visitors and aid them throughout their tour.

A Context-Based Adaptive Visualization Environment

Digital libraries and historical archives are increasingly employing visualization systems to facilitate the information retrieval and knowledge extraction tasks of their users. Typically, each organization employs a single visualization system, which may not suit best the needs of certain user groups, specific tasks, or properties of document collections to be visualized. In this paper, we present a context-based adaptive visualization environment, which embeds a set of visualization methods into a visualization library, from which the most appropriate one is selected for presenting information to the user. Methods are selected by examining parameters related to the user profile, system configuration and the set of data to be visualized, and employing a set of rules to assess the suitability of each method. The presented environment additionally monitors user behavior and preferences to adapt the visualization method selection criteria

Historical research in archives: user methodology and supporting tools

Historic research involves finding, using, and correlating information within primary and secondary sources, in order to communicate an understanding of past events. In this process, historians employ their scientific knowledge, experience, and intuition to formulate queries (who was involved in an event, when did an event occur etc.), and subsequently try to locate the pertinent information from their sources. In this article, the authors investigate how historians formulate queries, which query terms are chosen, and how historians proceed in searching for related information in sources. The insight gained from this investigation can be subsequently used for organizing documents within historical source repositories and building tools that will enable historians to access the needed information more rapidly and fully.

An approach for serious game development for cultural heritage: Case study for an archaeological site and museum

The unique aspects of different places seem to require games of different characteristics. This paper describes the initial steps of an attempt to design games for different places of cultural heritage and consists of three parts. In the first part, the descriptive model to be used as a classification method for games of different characteristics for cultural heritage sites is presented. In the second part, the model is used for the creation of different cultural heritage games. Finally, the third part presents a detailed case study of one of the developed games, showing the implementation and user testing processes as well as its efficiency in terms of education and visit motivation.

Designing a virtual museum within a museum

A virtual environment system installed within a real museum can offer a number of advantages, which are discussed in this paper: overcoming the lack of exhibition space, responding to the need for interaction with certain exhibits, affording easy transfer of exhibitions to remote sites. This paper also presents an approach towards designing and developing a virtual reality museum comprising ten different museums. The processes of digitisation, architectural design and exhibit presentation are outlined and points of particular importance are explained. Exhibits from real world museums have been digitised and integrated in this VE.

Gaming and Cognitive Profiles for Recommendations in Museums

This paper presents an approach to enhance museum visitors experience through the use of Gaming, Social Networks, and Recommendations. The originality of the dedicated social and mobile visit personalisation system is that it relies on both the users cognitive profile and his interests, inferred from a game on Facebook.