Observe: Ontology-based search engine for virtual museums

• Main Authors: Lazaro, Adela Anjelica C., Ong, James Mervin C., Syliongka, Leif Romeritch L.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2009
• Subjects: Virtual museums; Museum techniques > Technological innovations > Philippines; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/11183
• Institution: De La Salle University

Museums are institutions that were fostered to collect, conserve, and showcase historical facts for the purpose of cultural preservation, entertainment, inspiration, and enjoyment (Hong, Chen, Hsiang & Hsu, 2001). Together with the continuing progression of technology, museums have started to innovate themselves by digitizing their collection and allowing it to be accessed online. Searching in these systems, however, is complicated as search results are often irrelevant or incorrect since museums differ in naming, categorizing, and classifying their collections. It is for this reason that the concept of ontology was introduced. Ontology promotes relationship of objects from various collections and ensures that logical results are returned by finding the underlying concepts within the specified query. However, current ontology systems only make use of 'is-a' relationships that could only illustrate hierarchies of concepts based on its classification. In the domain of a museum, Hyvonen et al. (2004) explains that there are various ways to describe a single item as each has a life or history of its own. Hence, it is seen that if applied to museums, search results in these present ontology-based search systems are incomplete and limited. This research intend to develop a search engine for virtual museums that will make use of a concept-rich ontology to produce more meaningful search results. Culture semantics will be decided to the ontology as may be required by a virtual museum.