Evaluation of Mediating Agents that Personalize Museum Exhibitions

Despite having the potential to provide a knowledge sharing environment among experts (e.g. curators) and novices (e.g. museum visitors), traditional museums do not generally function in this way. The biggest problem is the lack of an efficient way for both experts and visitors to represent and exchange their knowledge, interests, and viewpoints, which would allow visitors to examine the exhibitions in a customized manner. Therefore, we have proposed mediating agents between experts and visitors to personalize museum exhibitions based on the needs of the visitor in order to enhance their understanding of the exhibitions. This personalization process can be considered asynchronous collaborative work by curators and visitors through the help of mediating agents. In this paper, we evaluate the mediating agents with a subjective experiment from the visitor's point of view. The results show that the mediating agents are effective in personalizing museum exhibitions.