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Since 2016 a smart museum of everyday life history has been developed within the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. This R&D project aims at solutions to the two important problems for creating a digital service-oriented environment for museum visitors and personnel: 1) offering personal recommendations on the museum collection with the use of semantic ranking methods and in context of the user and exhibition, 2) collaborative addition of information sources and their semantic annotation within the museum collection. Such solutions form the semantic layer of smart museum environment. This paper introduces our a) system design models for agent- based programming of museum information services, b) ranking models for semantic data mining in historical and cultural heritage domain. Our software implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed models in respect to the user mobility, service personalization, and collaborative work opportunity.

Nowadays many museums are being transformed to some “smart” variants: a cultural space in a digitally-equipped environment is formed where cultural heritage knowledge can be easily and collaboratively usable and creatable by interested visitors as well as by professionals. By using such innovative technologies as Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Spaces it is possible to shorten the distance between museum exhibits and collected historical information on one side and consumers and providers of this information on the other side. In this paper, we study the smart museum concept for development of software that realizes connection between the involved actors and shared cultural heritage knowledge. Our research and development are focused on designing a semantic layer in the form of a software infrastructure. This infrastructure is a middleware on top of which such advanced museum information services can be constructed as personal visit planning, virtual exhibition preparation, and collaborative enrichment the museum collection. We introduce a suit of smart space-based solutions to create this type of software infrastructures. The generic solutions are theoretically analyzed based on the case study of the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University (PetrSU).