The CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information Presentation) project is funded by Dutch Science Foundation NWO-CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) program. This work is a collaboration between the Technical University Eindhoven, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Telematica Institute.

The goal of the CHIP project is to demonstrate (i) how novel Semantic Web technologies can be deployed to enrich the Rijksmuseum vocabularies and providing semantic browsing, searching and semantic recommendations; and (ii) how personalization and user modeling techniques can be explored to enhance users’ experiences both on the museum Web site and in the physical museum space.

Currently, our demonstrator hosted four thesauri, namely the three Getty Vocabularies (ULAN, AAT, TGN) and the subject classification Iconclass. We used mappings to IconClass provided by STITCH project and the Getty thesauri conversion from their original XML format into an RDF/OWL representation done by MultimediaN E-culture project.

Based on the semantically-enriched data model, we have implemented three different components/tools in the CHIP demonstrator: Artwork Recommender, web-based virtual Tour Wizard and PDA-based Mobile Tour.
(i) Artwork Recommender. a Web-based rating dialog for artworks/topics to build a user profile, based on semantics-driven recommendations.
(ii) Tour Wizard. a Web-based tool using the user prole to generate (semi)automatically personalization virtual museum tours for each user.
(iii) Mobile Tour. a PDA-based tool to map virtual tours into the physical museum space with constraints; to give guidance to users and to synchronize the user profile on the web and in the PDA.