NODEM 2013 Conference

Founded in 1816, the Städel museum is a well renowned German art museum and faces several challenges: We’ve 100.000+ exhibits. But we can only show 99% of them. We’re engaged in more than 50 different educational programs. But we haven’t found a way addressing the diversified global audience needs through digital channels. We jumped into the digital world starting to digitise our content centrally, making it findable through semantic search. In a joint project we developed an exhibit platform realising a concept we call “digital strolling”.

Digital strolling redefines digital visits of a museum. Physically strolling through a museum means interacting with others, getting inspirations and exploring new content. The Google Museum approach is not a generically digital way as people would get information how an exhibit looks like and where it resides. Transferring this information cannot replace impressions given facing the original.

Real digital offerings should enrich the visitor’s initial interest, deliver more than requested and ignite interest in new topics.

The semantic search engine achieves this by intuitively matching digitised multimedia content which is based on a complex system indexing unstructured and structured data related to our exhibits.

Compared to lexical searching, the visitor gets a nudge to new but relevant content without being aware of it before. It supports digital visitors finding a path through vast offerings of digitised exhibits: Semantic searching brings up results being intrinsically relevant.

Digital visitors can save their visiting paths and also share and discuss with them with others. This goes toward high-quality consumer curation thanks to the inner semantic logic. Though not being comparable to art historians’ curations, it helps digital visitors expressing themselves better than submitting Facebook “likes” or pictures on Pinterest and alike. (Live demo planned).