Linked Data in Action: Personalized Museum Tours on Mobile Devices

Producing and maintaining museums audio guides is both time consuming and expensive. Typically the existing methods to build tour guides lack either the personalization aspect or the scalability aspect related to the ad hoc data format used to represent the exhibited objects. In this paper we present Living Museum, a free mobile application that assists museum visitors with recommendations and multimedia description of the visited artifacts. Our approach takes into account the location of the visitor and his profile that is incrementally built based on visited artifacts. We argue that Linked Open Data allows building repeatable methods and present a first prototype using the British Museum’s SPARQL endpoint. We provide general feedback on implementing semantic-web enabled applications on mobile devices and specific feedback on manipulating the British Museum dataset.