Context Aware Communication Services in "Active Museums"

Nowadays, technology enables museums to become "active". Shortly, museum visitors will be equipped with smart personal devices and the museum environment will be able to interact proactively with them, offering them various services. Visitors often tend to visit museums in groups, mainly with family or friends, yet most of today mobile museum guides focus on supporting the individual visitor. Current museum visitor guides and other mobile guides described in the literature sometimes allow interaction between visitors. Such interaction, especially in museums may enhances the overall visit experience. These specific communication services can be abstracted to a general set of context-aware communication services. This paper presents an abstract definition of context-aware communication services for an active museum. The service agent developed in the framework of the PIL project is a prototype system for such general communication services framework. Such framework will ease the development of applications aimed at providing communication services in active environment.