New Ways of Exploring Connections Between Cultural Heritage Objects

Abstract

This paper describes PLUGGY platform which is the first European social platform for cultural heritage and its extension the Smart Discovery tool. These tools were developed to bring culture closer to a wider public audience. After decades of digitization of cultural heritage objects there are several initiatives to present all these data in a meaningful, engaging and educational way. Most of the time these digital libraries present content only in searchable list format without meaningful interpretation. PLUGGY platform tries to fill this gap with a set of authoring and presentation tools. These tools allow creation of a wide variety of virtual exhibitions and narrative stories linked to the content from the digital libraries or user's uploaded content. We are extending PLUGGY with the Smart Discovery tool for the simplification of the curatorial process. It is a visualization, modelling and recommendation tool for the elimination of a cognitive load of art curators. The tool allows to model relationships between cultural heritage objects. During the modelling process the tool recommends related concepts aggregated from multiple external art content libraries. Created models can be transformed to the different types of virtual exhibitions skeletons ready for further PLUGGY curation.