Semantic infrastructure of a smart museum: toward making cultural heritage knowledge usable and creatable by visitors and professionals

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Spaces technologies enable development of new information services operating with descriptions of museum exhibits and available cultural heritage knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a smart museum concept where information services are not limited with straightforward provision of record-based description of exhibits, as it happens in traditional museum information systems. The concept is based on services with high intelligence level when additional historical sources can be used to semantically enrich the museum collection, including knowledge acquired from visitors and museum professionals. A museum becomes a cultural space where its semantic layer makes knowledge usable and creatable by visitors and professionals. Our research focus is on applying this concept to the case study of the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. A concept prototype is created, as a mandatory development phase of complex systems engineering, to analyze the need, feasibility, and technical approach. The concept prototype follows the smart spaces approach for IoT environments and defines design solutions for creating a semantic infrastructure that transforms a given museum into its smart variant.