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Knowledge Management: a new challenge for science museums

By Marco Meli - February 2003

Marco Meli reports on the MESMUSES project: an EU co-funded initiative to reuse innovatively the most valuable scientific and technical heritage available in science museums so that it may serve as an "active memory" of knowledge to be exploited in different domains.

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Introduction

Self-learning environments provide their users the opportunity to explore various knowledge spaces. A classic issue when designing such environments is finding the right balance between leaving users complete freedom or guiding them very rigidly from one knowledge item to the next. Another issue is the to provision of an environment in which a set of facts and of abstract concepts can be presented differently according to the users' background and understanding. A knowledge map is a set a related concepts and facts that is offered to users with some guidance or suggestions on possible itineraries that they may follow to explore the knowledge space.

MESMUSES (MEthapors for Science MUSEumS) aims to design a general method and supporting tools to produce such knowledge maps. The method and the tools are tested and validated by two large science museums, the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris and the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence, which provide access to their digital catalogues. Both museums are developing knowledge maps and itineraries on different themes in Biology (Genome) and Physics (Galileo and the laws of motion). A group of industrial partners (Finsiel and EDW in Italy and Valoris in France) and academic institutions (INRIA and ENST- Bretagne in France, Institute of Computer Science of FORTH in Greece, and University of Florence in Italy) are contributing to the methodology and the implementation of the supporting technology.

Knowledge Maps for the Public and Exhibitors Alike

MESMUSES is engaged in the design of and experimentation with metaphors for organising, structuring and presenting scientific and technical knowledge provided to the public in science museums. These metaphors are built upon knowledge maps which define and connect neighbouring knowledge units. These maps are made visible and can be browsed through so-called "semantic portals" which enable users to locate easily information relevant to their current interest, and to navigate either on predefined itineraries, or on new routes that they select for themselves on the map. The same knowledge structure should also facilitate management and reuse of information assets by producers, for example museum staff preparing supporting content for a temporary exhibition.

The Role of the Digital Surrogate

Central to our approach is the policy that all objects, facts or concepts in the real world are represented by digital surrogates. These surrogates are themselves defined as instances of general categories. For instance, all the scientific instruments from the collection of the Museum of the History of Science in Florence can be represented by surrogates -i.e. structured descriptions- which are instances of the class "Instrument". Any instrument is described by attributes such as its name, construction period, material, etc. Attributes are chosen for each class in order to form together meaningful descriptions of the objects that the surrogates of this class will represent. In the same way, scientists, theories, or experiments are represented by surrogates. The surrogate classes are connected one to the other by predefined relations : a scientist contributes to a theory and runs an experiment, an experiment confirms or contradicts a theory, a theory may subsume another and so forth.

The categories and the relations between them form together a generic knowledge map, or as linguists say, a "domain of discourse". Computer scientists prefer to name this map an "ontology", although this word is somewhat misleading. This map can be populated with information extracted from museum databases, or created on purpose by authors. When populated with resources, the map forms a so-called "semantic web". An important feature of semantic webs is that the underlying knowledge maps are graphs of related concepts. The names given to the concepts and to the relations between them constitute a terminology that is instrumental for information exchange and for enacting cooperative processes within a community of users, e.g. researchers, students, lecturers, etc.

A knowledge itinerary is a path through the graph of the knowledge map which is proposed to the visitor. When user follow an itinerary, they are offered various resources, (examples, contrary examples, explanations, etc.), which are chosen according to their preference and background. Knowledge itineraries are considered a new way of exploiting museum resources, where they are used as assets in the production of courseware for teaching or self-learning.

Project Objectives

One of the first objectives of the project was to establish and validate a methodology and related tools for Scientific Knowledge Cartography. This methodology defines how to create knowledge maps structuring some domains of scientific knowledge.

A second objective was to design tools for creating "itineraries" on the knowledge landscape, to orient museum visitors through a real physical exhibition or a virtual one. The Consortium has developed specialised tools and architecture to implement the itinerary mechanism, both as static (predefined) itineraries and dynamic ones (generated from the indexed resources during navigation).

A third objective, tightly linked to the previous one is to design personalisation methods which will offer different itineraries on the same knowledge domains to the different categories of visitors, from the very young to the elderly, and to university scholars. We intend to experiment with dynamic re-routing of visitors from one itinerary to another according to their queries or requests.

The last major objective of the project is to design various tools for managing and reusing information assets. Managing information resources involves in particular indexing them in the terms of the conceptual schema, (whatever the format and media of these resources), from say, a section in a book chapter, physically available in the museum library and represented by a digital surrogate such as a UNIMARC record, to multimedia online content.

So far, the MESMUSES Project is achieving its goals and is actively contributing to the validation of the semantic web concepts and standards.

Exploitation

Building the Information Society, where digital assets can be fully exploited, is a key priority for Europe. A major asset which can "make the difference" is the effective exploitation of cultural heritage in novel ways, with a clear strategy for a long standing value building proposition in key market segments like learning. Innovative approaches like managing cultural assets with the paradigm of modern knowledge management techniques are among the most prominent examples of leveraging technologies for the cultural heritage domain.

The MESMUSES Project falls exactly into this category: it proposes to access multimedia cultural information by creating a novel way of navigating through digital assets by means of itineraries, learning environments professionally created or developed by users themselves.

Exploitation in Mesmuses is geared towards the following objectives:

1. The innovation, both in concept and underlying technology, to create new and powerful ways of exploiting rich cultural heritage assets. The scientific cartography metaphor is new and allows a graceful combination of authoring for didactic purposes and research. This approach will be exploited by the creation of running systems at the cultural heritage partners' premises. At the Cité des Sciences, the target application deals with biology and the human genome in particular. Target users are secondary school teachers preparing didactic multimedia folders for their students. In the case of IMSS, (Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza - Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence, Italy), the target domain deals with the scientific revolution. The application will evaluate the proposed technology as an instrument of research for historians
2. The underlying technology framework, the CWEB engine, which is a state of the art knowledge management tool. This technology, which is one the main outcomes of the project, is available as open source to the interested community of computer scientists. A more stable version of the technology is to be produced by a new company, AM2-Systems, which will spin off at the beginning of 2003 to capitalise on an industrial version of the Mesmuses / Cweb technology. AM2-Systems will offer products for corporate memory management
3. The Global Information Service Architecture. The method and tools developed within the project are well suited for supporting the creation of large international knowledge banks, continuously fed by large numbers of cultural organisations, museums, libraries, academic laboratories, etc. This particular exploitation mechanism, though already conceived, has yet to get fully underway. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that only a series of success stories in building knowledge repositories will gradually be able to convince cultural organisations that the approach is viable and that they can share their information assets through a world-wide distributed knowledge map. Another reason why this exploitation may only take off slowly is that the business model making the venture self-sustaining is still to be invented

Conclusions

The Mesmuses experience demonstrates that the semantic web family of methods, standards and tools can be exploited by cultural organisations to offer to their visitors new knowledge discovery services. This may open opportunities for inventing more interactive and attractive web contents than the traditional online exhibition catalogues.

Author Details

Marco Meli
CEO and Cofounder
EDW International
Via Abamonti 2
20129 Milano
Italy

URL:http://www.edw-international.com/
Email: meli@edw.it
Phone: +39 02 29513925
Fax: +39 02 295123930

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For citation purposes:
Meli, M. "Knowledge Management: a new challenge for science museums", Cultivate Interactive, issue 9, 7 February 2003
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue9/mesmuses/>

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