A Platform for Delivering Multimedia Presentations on Cultural Heritage

2010 14th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics

S. Bibi, P. Tsompanopoulou, A. Fevgas, N. Fraggogiannis, A. Martini, A. Zaharis, and P. Bozanis

Centre for Research and Technology - Thessaly Department of Computer and Communication (CE.RE.TE.TH) Engineering Technology Park of Thessaly, 1st Industrial Area, University of Thessaly 385 00 Volos, Greece Glavani 37, 382 21 Volos, Greece e-mails: [email protected],{yota, fevgas, nfragog, dmartin, alzahar, pbozanis}@inf.uth.gr

Abstract— In this paper we present a platform for delivering We are developing a platform that aims the delivery of multimedia presentations on cultural heritage. The platform personalized content to groups of visitors. The main aims to enhance cultural knowledge discovery by increasing objective is to emphasize on the educational and informative access to museums’ digital content. The platform generates aspect by dynamically created presentations considering the rich media presentations considering the personal profile of the individuality of the audience. These presentations will be audience as well as its interests. The presentations may include accessible physically in the museum or via web. Our text, images, video and sound and can be delivered via application is going to be deployed in Athanasakeion network. They can be attended either inside the museum or Archaeological Museum of Volos, Greece. even outside of it e.g. in schools during a preparation class The platform, exploits modern technology to support and prior to a museum visit. The platform supports creation and influence the way people collect experience and create editing of slides and presentations, updating existing knowledge in and out of museums. One aspect of this presentations and projecting them, considering different roles and access levels for archeologists, tourist guides, educators influence is derived by the use of multimedia in learning and individuals. environments. According to Multimedia Learning Theory [4], optimal learning occurs when both visual and verbal Keywords- cultural application; multimedia; streaming materials are presented simultaneously. Also, in [5] visitors’ media; educational software; web presentations feedback had straightened out that multimedia presentations strongly contribute to the digestion of the archeological I. INTRODUCTION remains. In the resent years museum visitors spend more and more This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes time on museums’ web sites in order to prepare their on-site the findings of other researchers in this field, and Section 3 visits. Thus, many research projects aim to develop presents the functionality of the application regarding personalized services both on line and on site [1]. In addition presentation creation and projection. Section 4 introduces to many museums around the world have established platform’s architecture and finally Section 5 concludes the educational programs targeted to groups of visitors. We paper. intend for a platform to assist visitor groups for preparing II. RELATED WORK their visit and enhance their experience during their stay in the museum. Several remote web education systems have been Museums’ visitors could be categorized by their interests. proposed to deliver educational content. These systems There are visitors who are interested in the whole exhibition support authoring of reusable web-based presentations from (e.g., group of tourists, guided or not), others that are live lectures at universities. Actually, they record and encode interested in a particular thematic entity (e.g., school streams of audio, video and integrate into them additional students) and finally archeologists or hobbyists who are multimedia material such as Powerpoint slides. In [6] is seeking for specialized information in depth. Our platform presented a remote web education system named ESB delivers personalized information to all these types of (Education System Board) that supports video streams, slides visitors. and handwriting. Media synchronization was also Educational programs comprise presentations, video investigated. A toolkit for producing reusable, web based projections, games (e.g., puzzles, quizzes, etc.), lectures, and presentations, named Lectures on Demand (LoD) of live activities like pottery, handicrafts etc. Special projection lectures is presented in [7]. It enables lecture recording, rooms are equipped to support partially such programs. editing of the recording, adding of slides, annotations, Usually instructors prepare their students prior to museum diagrams, animations and links. visits by using lendable educational material provided by the Web conference systems can be used for live museums [2][3]. In Athanassakeio Museum of Volos, this presentations via internet. A typical web conference system material includes slides and text documents regarding to may support slide presentations, live audio and video Mycenaean Civilization and local history, and helps the streaming, desktop sharing, text chats, etc. Adobe’s Connect students to digest easier the archeological material. [8] and Cisco’s WebEx [9] are commercial representative

Figure 1. Authoring a new presentation from left-to-right. products and Openmeetings [10] is a full-featured open Slimey [14] is an open source web slideshow editor, source alternative. Slimey uses the SLIM format. SLIM stands for Slideshows Web presentation systems are on line platforms that Microformat and is an extension to the S5. Its functionality enable users to create, manage and share presentations. includes: insertion and removal of text, images and bulleted Several frameworks and tools have been designed and lists, addition, removal and reordering of slides, developed in this area. Slidy is an XHTML Framework to undoing/redoing, changing font face, font color and font size create slideshows using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and of elements, text formatting (i.e., bold, underline, italics), present them using a web browser. Each presentation is a viewing source code, previewing and saving presentation. single XHTML file and each slide is enclosed in a

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element. JavaScript is used to system built on Cappucino open source framework. control the presentation by hiding or showing the div Sliderocket [16] and Zoho [17] are representative elements, while CSS is used to specify the appearance of the commercial web presentation systems that offer advanced presentations. Slidy and an editor created along were functionality. presented in [11]. S5 [12] stands for Simple Standards-based Slide Show System and is a Slidy's alternative which also III. THE PLATFORM uses XHTML, CSS and Javascript to format slide shows. Our platform, still under development, automatically Both frameworks support light-weight cross platform and organizes exhibit’s data connected semantically to each other cross browser presentations whose appearance can be easily into the form of presentations, providing access to museum changed by applying a new style sheet. knowledge according to the user’s profile and interests. The XSLidy [13] extents Slidy and is an XSLT-based tool, platform provides three main functionalities: a) Presentation which allows users to create simple XML files for their Authoring, where the user may create a new presentation presentations. Slidy presentations are generated through retrieving content form museum’s database, b) Presentation these XML files, with specific advantages like cross- Synthesis, where the user may compose a presentation using presentation links and advanced navigation features. Also by existing presentations and, c) Presentation Projection, where adding one more XSLT layer one can add its own the user sel