The Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa, MP) is a virtual museum with the purpose of exhibit life stories of common people. Its assets are composed of several interviews involving people whose stories we want to perpetuate. So the museum holds an heterogeneous collection of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents that constitute the working repository. The main idea is to extract automatically the information included in the repository in order to build the virtual museum's exhibition rooms. The goal of this paper is to describe an architectural approach to build a system that will create the virtual rooms from the XML repository to enable visitors to lookup individual life stories and also inter-cross information among them. We adopted the standard for museum ontologies CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) refined with FOAF (Friend of a Friend) and DBpedia ontologies to represent OntoMP. That ontology is intended to allow a conceptual navigation over the available information. The approach here discussed is based on a TripleStore and uses SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) to extract the information. Aiming at the extraction of meaningful information, we built a text filter that converts the interviews into a RDF triples file that reflects the assets described by the ontology.

The Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa, MP) is a virtual museum aimed at exhibiting life stories of common people. Its assets are composed of several interviews involving people whose stories we want to perpetuate. So the museum holds an heterogeneous collection of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents that constitute the working repository. The main idea is to extract automatically the information included in the repository in order to build the web pages that realize the museum's exhibition rooms. This project started by creating a specific ontology (OntoMP) for the knowledge repository of MP. That ontology is intended to allow a conceptual navigation over the available information. We will adopt the standard for museum ontologies CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) refined with FOAF to represent OntoMP. The objective of this paper is to discuss different architectural approaches to build a system that will create the virtual rooms from the XML repository to enable visitors to lookup individual life stories and also intercross information among them. The first architecture is based on a TripleStore and uses SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) technology to extract the information, while the second proposal is based on a Relational Database and uses CaVa Generator to query the repository and build the exhibition spaces.

The creation of Learning Spaces on the Web, like the exhibition rooms of virtual museums, supported by an ontology that enables a conceptual navigation over the learning objects exposed, is a hard and complex task but of uttermost importance for the success of the knowledge acquisition process. In our opinion, the creation must be systematic and reusable from case to case, based on the query of the ontology instances that describe the museum assets. We will discuss how the ontology definition drives the way SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries extract information from the TripleStore to be prepared for visualization. However, to enable this approach, we need to populate the ontology in an automatic way, extracting the data from the annotated documents in the institution repository. We intend to show how that process can be implemented using the Museum of the Person (MP) as a case-study, describing the XML2RDF tool developed. To illustrate the complete approach proposed we will include a guided visit to the exhibition rooms of MP created according to that proposal and by our tools.

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This paper is concerned with the creation of a specific ontology for the knowledge repository of the Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa). The Museum of the Person assets are composed of several interviews (collected previously for a large cultural project) involving common people, to perpetuate their life stories. The museum holds an heterogeneous collection of XML documents. In such format, the collection items are many times not recognizable and understandable by the visitors who wish to explore it. Therefore, we intend to use an ontology that allows a conceptual navigation over the available information, enabling the visitors to extract knowledge during the visit to these life stories. So, this paper aims at presenting the ontology we have developed using CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM)[1] to enable visitors to lookup individual life stories, read them, and also intercross information among a cluster of life stories to build up the story of a company/institution or to study social behaviors and customs.

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Several applications are based on Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). They provide the right terminology to a peculiar problem/subject, because they use a particular domain vocabulary that defines abstract concepts, different from general-purpose languages. Aiming an easy generation of virtual Learning Spaces (LS) for the use of the responsible of institutional archives or museums, we have idealized and developed an external domain-specific language, called CaVa DSL, to describe, in an abstract level, virtual exhibition rooms in the museum curator's viewpoint, giving the curator the possibility to specify the virtual LS upon a domain ontology vocabulary. We also contribute with a set of processors that deal with CaVa DSL and generates virtual Learning Spaces, turning available the navigation over important and real information contained in archival documents to the public through virtual museums. To demonstrate the obtained results, we present a running example along the paper showing the virtual LS generation process.