Stuart's PhD Work

My PhD was concerned with the reuse of museum information, collections databases, curator notes, catalogue entries and so on for computer aided learning. I aimed to acheive this by structuring the musuem information in a rigourous object oriented manner and applying novel hypermedia techniques to them. This would allow people who were not museum experts to work with and extract meaning from this information.

Recent Paper

I recently wrote a paper which describes this work and my conclusions on it, I've made it available here in Abobe Acrobat format. To read this you need the Adobe Acrobat Version 3 reader, which is freely available from http://www.adobe.com/acrobat/ for most common platforms, some versions of Netscape have it built in. (Apologies for the quality of the figures, it's not all Acrobat's fault).

If you have any comments then let me know.

If you'd like something a little more thorough, here is my PhD abstract:

PhD Abstract

Museums hold many of the most significant objects in the world. They hold extensive in-formation on these objects in various forms, but this resource has so far been inaccessible for educational uses outside museums. As museum materials are being computerised, this information is becoming more accessible for reuse in other areas like computer aided learn-ing (CAL). However the creation of such materials for public use in museum interactives is, in almost all cases ad-hoc. Through the use of a suitably designed data model museum information can be stored in a single highly structured database that can support current uses of the information inside the museum for curation and public interactives and outside the museum by non-museum experts to provide a rich source of material for other users.

This thesis presents a methodology for the structuring and encoding of all types of museum information to create such a data model. This model can support all museum uses of the information, as specified by documentation standards and the retrieval and reorganisation of this material by CAL authors. The material is structured so that it can be accessed in different ways by different user types for different purposes. Museum information is stored as distinct units called entity-objects (EOs), which capture all information relating to an object, person, place or company. These EOs are then linked together for context independent purposes, to reflect connections between museum objects and people, places and so forth. This data model uses novel hypermedia modelling techniques to create varied abstractions of the museum material for different users. Additionally it addresses the need to store record based material (the basis of most object descriptions), free text and media clips in a consistent manner. EOs are context independant. Relevant parts of them are abstracted for a specific use by wrappers. Wrappers are linked together to create structures specific to the context for which a wrapper was created. These structures aid the organisation and retrieval of objects and create a varied range of abstractions to help support reuse.

A truly reusable database of museum materials must facilitate the creation of both museum interactives and CAL systems for more than one age range. EOs and wrappers have layers, these allow different representations of each piece of information they contain to be stored. This allows a variety of users to see a view of the material in the database which in terms of language and complexity is suited to their needs. This aids the use of the material with users who are unfamiliar with the technical nature of museum documentation and specific difficulties encountered with museum materials (for example the need to store vague dates). To complete the layering of the model, links between entity-objects are also layered, users of different skill levels will see different links from a wrapper or entity-object and so will see structures of varying complexity, depending on their needs.

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