Dramasearch. Character-mediated search in cultural heritage

The Dramasearch project imports the Dramatour methodology for character-based guided tours into interactive search applications for Web sites and data repositories. The virtual character acts as a mediator between the user and the search engine, without replacing but complementing the role of the search engine. The character interacts with the user through a multimodal interface, with the aim of assisting the user to formulate her/his query in an effective way, presenting her/him the results and recommending related resources. In this paper, we describe an architecture for character-mediated search applications. In particular, we describe the process of dramatizing the interaction with the user, a feature that is required to qualify the character as a cooperative agent, and we show how the domain expertise of the character, embedded in the architecture as a semantic search layer, is exploited to construct the coherence of the interaction.