A complex network approach for museum services: A model for digital content management

In a globalized economy, cultural heritage is a strong attractor. Thanks to ICT, it is possible to trigger new development dynamics. For cultural heritage, the contribution of new technologies can offer the highest degree of distribution and access opportunities. A modern museum can actually be seen as a complex ICT system, deeply interconnected, with typically a large quantity of data to manage, extremely dynamic due to ever-changing temporary exhibitions, and with applications that feature a high level of usability for a higher visitor involvement. The aim of this position paper is to create an approach geared to provide aggregated information on the nature, range and articulation of the belongings of the museum, through a paradigm based on the concept of complex network. Applying the complex network model, it will be possible to map a corpora of items made of works of art, artifacts and any object of interest for a museum. The implications derived from the adoption of this approach are multifarious: for example, a curator could evaluate partnership opportunities in the organization of temporary exhibitions, guided paths or catalog editing through an analysis of the relations between the items in their museum and the ones in other museums.