Eghemon: a distributed, PDA-based Museum Guide

Cultural heritage access can benefit from the adoption of information technology to enhance the tourist experience. In particular, this paper focus on the visits to museums, proposing our experience in developing a system that supports the tourists during the visit to the different rooms containing artworks. The proposed system relies on context-aware mobile devices, which propose multimedia information to the visitors and can dynamically manage the needed information about artworks. A fixed PC-based distributed infrastructure not only provides such information, but also monitors the presence of devices in the rooms, realizing the so-called “context-awareness”. This leads to some advantage from both tourist and museum point of view in terms of flexibility, adaptability and maintenance. In this paper we explain the development of the system and show its use.