MoMo: enabling hybrid museums

Present-day museums are not mere passive institutions for the preservation of a society´s cultural heritage. They have become instead learning environments, research centres and even tourist attractions. The paper introduces the notion of a hybrid museum (HM) in which wireless personal digital devices (PDAs) are used to tailor digital contents to the visitor to enrich both the learning and entertainment experience. The paper describes a fully functional hybrid museum infrastructure (MoMo) implemented with the .NET compact framework running on the PocketPC platform. Several research challenges that had to be faced during the implementation of the system such as the exploration of large sets of information on PDAs are also presented; and the customisation and personalisation of the displayed contents using a modified partial prediction matching algorithm are also discussed.