The virtual museum: an integrated text and image database

We describe our “virtual museum” project: an union of image and text retrieval technologies that allows users to visit art collections on the Web. The virtual museum is composed of a series of rooms that the user can visit. The connections between the rooms are variable: passing from a room to another yields a result which is the outcome of a query, and depends on the query criterion that the user has selected. This “variable topology” adds interest to the museum visit since it allows the visitor, within certain limits, to customize his/her museum experience and to make it different every time