Emmanouil Ntafotis’s research while affiliated with Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas and other places

In this paper, we present an interactive guided tour of the House-Museum of Eleftherios Venizelos located in the city of Chania, Crete, Greece. The mobile application is using a mixture of Bluetooth beacons and Augmented Reality (AR) to expand the museum experience both while visiting the museum and when planning for a museum visit. In terms of tour personalisation, several options are provided including short and long tours and audience-specific tours for younger generations.

We present a mobile application that is bringing to life historic photographs of Heraklion by mapping them in historical routes within the city and offering the visitor a dialogue with its social and historical context. At the same time while visiting the public library where these historic photographs are exhibited, the mobile app enhances the provided information by virtually replacing the photographs with alternative views from different historic periods.KeywordsAugmented RealityMobile technologyMobile GuidesCultural Heritage

This work presents a web-based authoring tool that enables museum curators and individuals to make digital collections of exhibits accessible and explorable via the Web. It allows users to create interactive and immersive virtual 3D/VR exhibitions using a unified collaborative authoring environment based on a Human-Centered Design approach with the active participation of museum curators and end-users. Main contributions are pertinent to the fields of (a) user-designed dynamic virtual exhibitions, (b) exhibition tours, (c) visualization in web-based 3D/VR technologies, and (d) immersive navigation and interaction.

In knowledge representation systems for Cultural Heritage (CH) there is a vast amount of curated textual information for CH objects and sites. However, the large-scale study of the accumulated knowledge is difficult as long as it is provided in the form of free text. By extracting the most significant pieces of information from textual descriptions of CH objects and sites and compiling them in a single comprehensive knowledge graph, conforming to a standard would facilitate its exploitation from multiple perspectives including study, presentation and narratives. The method proposed by this research work was to employ Natural Language Processing, and reinforcement learning for semantic knowledge extraction, and a knowledge representation standard of the CH domain for the knowledge graph thus making the extracted knowledge directly compatible with linked open data platforms and CH representation systems.

With the ever-advancing availability of digitized museum artifacts, the question of how to make the vast collection of exhibits accessible and explorable beyond what museums traditionally offer via their websites and exposed databases has recently gained increased attention. This research work introduces the Invisible Museum: a user-centric platform that allows users to create interactive and immersive virtual 3D/VR exhibitions using a unified collaborative authoring environment. The platform itself was designed following a Human-Centered Design approach, with the active participation of museum curators and end-users. Content representation adheres to domain standards such as International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC-CRM) and the Europeana Data Model and exploits state-of-the-art deep learning technologies to assist the curators by generating ontology bindings for textual data. The platform enables the formulation and semantic representation of narratives that guide storytelling experiences and bind the presented artifacts with their socio-historic context. Main contributions are pertinent to the fields of (a) user-designed dynamic virtual exhibitions, (b) personalized suggestions and exhibition tours, (c) visualization in web-based 3D/VR technologies, and (d) immersive navigation and interaction. The Invisible Museum has been evaluated using a combination of different methodologies, ensuring the delivery of a high-quality user experience, leading to valuable lessons learned, which are discussed in the article.