Web-Assisted Visits to Cultural Heritage

The wide access to cultural heritage is gaining more and more interest from the information technology community. Museums, exhibitions and cultural places are becoming enterprises that supply new services to access cultural information, and this calls for suitable infrastructures and tools. In such a context, this paper proposes a distributed application to enable virtual visits, based on an infrastructure exploiting innovative technologies such as active proxy servers and mobile agents. Such application is integrated within the Web and permits to build up virtual visits that can be attended by groups of people interested in the same subject. Such visits are tailored on the basis of users' profiles and devices, and can be enhanced by the availability of distributed services. This grants a high degree of flexibility and autonomy for our application.