Peter Goodall

Virtual museums and Web-based digital ecosystems

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific was developed by the authors and launched by the Australian Museum in November 2009. A digital ecosystem implemented as Web 2.0 application, the VMP is an experimental platform with information and knowledge acquisition for the Australian Museums Pacific collection. Importantly, the VMP facilitates a number of social media interfaces that enable content to be added and tagged, the control vocabulary to be extended, user perspectives to be defined and narratives added via wiki. It is therefore extensible. This paper concentrates on technical issues involving several search methods: attribute search based on a control vocabulary, query refinement and query-by-example. In doing so, the paper illustrates the issues involved in abstracting a generic collection management framework that can be re-used for developing other semantic Web digital ecosystems for other collection content.

Information Retrieval and Social Tagging for Digital Libraries Using Formal Concept Analysis

This paper reports a novel semantic web application developed to deliver a collaborative tagging system for a digital on-line museum. The key features of our application -- called the Virtual Museum of the Pacific -- concern the browsing and retrieval interface based on Formal Concept Analysis the extensible distributed data model to support collaborative tagging and its web services implementation.

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

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.