A smart space-based design of semantic layer for advancing museum information services

Nowadays many museums are being transformed to some “smart” variants: a cultural space in a digitally-equipped environment is formed where cultural heritage knowledge can be easily and collaboratively usable and creatable by interested visitors as well as by professionals. By using such innovative technologies as Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Spaces it is possible to shorten the distance between museum exhibits and collected historical information on one side and consumers and providers of this information on the other side. In this paper, we study the smart museum concept for development of software that realizes connection between the involved actors and shared cultural heritage knowledge. Our research and development are focused on designing a semantic layer in the form of a software infrastructure. This infrastructure is a middleware on top of which such advanced museum information services can be constructed as personal visit planning, virtual exhibition preparation, and collaborative enrichment the museum collection. We introduce a suit of smart space-based solutions to create this type of software infrastructures. The generic solutions are theoretically analyzed based on the case study of the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University (PetrSU).