Visualising Museum Stories

Storytelling is fundamental to our ability to understand, and find meaning in, the world around us. Stories allow us to organise and share knowledge, and to identify the relationships between objects, events, and experiences. Within museums stories allow visitors to engage with collections and to gain meaningful understanding of museum objects. Stories transform a collection of objects into a meaningful knowledge structure that connects the objects and give them meaning. This paper describes the Open Source Storyscope system that has been developed by the EU FP7 DECIPHER project. Storyscope’s workspace and tools allow museum professionals and visitors to research, develop, and present stories that connect objects across museum collections. Storyscope has been built using advanced machine reasoning technologies that help the user to search for, organise and present resources from Collection Management Systems from Linked Data sources.