KMM (EN)

The KMM-project

Over the last ten years, building highly interactive ICT-based museum repositories of culture and history content has proven more complicated than just opening the old sources to the Internet. Current database systems are mainly designed for internal use and for small groups of users inside the museums. These systems are designed for keeping record of objects. They do not support the organization and aggregation of knowledge and information for public use. Naturally, this information structure raises a number of problems for the museum sector in trying to meet new demands from schools, society and owners for the provision of relevant information from the databases for pedagogical purposes etc. Since these systems give no, or very little, support for collaborative long term aggregation of knowledge inside the museums, there should be no reason to expect them to provide the requested knowledge to users outside the museums.

Simultaneously, a rapidly growing part of the Swedish cultural heritage is in digital form, covering born digital documents, data bases, books, newspapers, pictures etc., as well as digitisation of analogue materials to improve accessibility and usability; it covers museum collections of objects, sound recording, choreographic 3D archives for movement documentation, 3D-models of cultural or/and heritage sites, all types of GIS-applications etc. There is a consensus among the cultural heritage institutions that the digital content in their holdings and collections is essential, and that some basic conditions need to be fulfilled to make it more accessible and available to users. The digital information should be

  • easy to find and easy to retrieve, also cross-sectorial
  • possible for the user to fully understand, accept and use
  • retrievable, accessible and usable not only on short term but also for future generations
  • provided with a suitable context to support learning for all categories of users
  • adaptable to new perceptions of artefacts promoted by emergent practices of learning.

EU cooperation, further, introduces new requirements in Swedish museums. They are now included in a European sphere with a series of new objectives, and guidelines to observe. Sweden is in many areas of ICT in museums bypassed by the common European development. Through the creation of a Swedish Testbed and R&D environment, the project

intends to establish itself as a long-term leading partner within the EU collaboration in the field. Most acute in the close future, is to harmonise our efforts with the guiding principles and programs carried out by the EU; for example the work with the Dynamic Action Plan and the venture for the European Digital Library.

The KMM project (Knowledge Management in Museums) focuses on soft infrastructure, intelligent user centred learning environments, knowledge systems and knowledge management relevant for the museums and cultural heritage sector. As initial step, the KMM project creates the first generation of a service development platform, necessary infrastructure, as well as visions and strategies for further research and development of ICT services.

A fundamental issue in the project is to create services and service environments addressing needs of users to replace the present internally oriented systems. The focus shifts away from questions on distribution of information available in the existing systems and the main issues become what information the systems need to contain to correspond to the needs of the surrounding world (education system, research, lifelong learning etc.) in a searchable and distributed ICT environment. The project in the long run aims at establishing a knowledge oriented perspective on content in the systems, and at building a creative and intelligent learning environment making it possible for different user categories to handle this more comprehensible content.

Another central issue concerns creation of services and environments allowing larger groups of citizens to take active part in the building of knowledge on the common cultural heritage. Today a great part of the available knowledge is barred from the museums. External researchers, amateurs and interested citizens cannot share their own knowledge about museum collections, as the relevant services are missing as well as the infrastructure. This a long term process, though, where the initial steps have to address a series of fundamental problems, to provide means for the work on larger goals. In the first years the aims and goals therefore are:

  • Advanced Testbed and R&D environment: In five years the KMM platform should be established in the EU as one of the leading test and development environments for museum sector needs. In 2020 Sweden shall be world leading in learning environments, knowledge engineering and knowledge management in the cultural heritage sector.
  • Soft infrastructure: Create a working infrastructure and demonstrate how it creates conditions for overlapping and coordination between different technical platforms in the cultural heritage sector. This will result in higher quality, better access, cost reductions for individual museums, and possibilities for growth on a future market for e-services in the sector.
  • Open learning environments: to have established conditions and models for making the system a creative user centred learning environment, available for all interested users and possible to integrate with other actors in the cultural heritage sector. This involves collecting knowledge on the motives of the public for using new ICT- applications
  • Conceptual Reference Model: to show how the introduction of models as the CIDOC CRM (http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/) might change the view on how museums handles information, and demonstrate the advantages with using theoretical models in the management of information compared to the current situation, where the complex relation to the concept of knowledge in the museum context eventually is forced into primitive database structures
  • Data Quality: to demonstrate how quality of data in museum systems can be drastically enhanced with the help of validated and typed data, tools for intelligent registering, through the use of expert systems, automatic registering, and conceptual models for description of content.