Towards a versatile metadata exchange format for digital museum collections

This paper presents further extensions of the virtual museum metadata set ViMCOX (Virtual Museum and Cultural Object Exchange Format). Recent research in the field of virtual museum design illustrates issues concerned with presenting content and contextual information for heterogeneous audiences; it addresses visitors´ preferences for guidance as well as their need for content-related and technical mediation during virtual museum visits. This paper describes the incorporation of the TourML metadata scheme, which allows visitors to take guided tours of a 3D virtual museum or to ”wander” through the virtual rooms and to select from a range of multilingual supplementary materials. In doing so, it references the exhibition space modeling capabilities of ViMCOX as well as real museum visitors´ behaviors. Furthermore, the paper presents new metadata components for extended architectural design, re-use of environmental 3D models as exhibition space and new illumination metadata elements for designing light sources that affect the exhibitions´ ambient light. New user-to-object interaction patterns for navigation aids and information visualization are described such that content creators can decide how supplementary material and contextual information are accessed and presented. In addition, we present the re-use and linking of open data collections, documentation and artworks using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).