Research On Resource Virtualization And Data Integration In Digital Museum

Museums preserve abounding information of human civilization process. They are strong witnesses of national or regional cultural heritage and development. The three basic properties of a museum-physical collections, scientific researches, and community education are also reflected in the Digital Museum (DM). The DM utilizes modern information technologies to do the collection and digital processing on the multimedia information of museum collections, such as images, text, audio, video and scientific data. It bands together digital information resources scattered in different forms and different areas by network to share the achieved resources. The DM is the product in the new situation for the protection, research, development and utilization of cultural heritage, and is a set of object-oriented, distributed, platform-independent collections of digital resources.The constructions of the large number of museums provide new platforms for the protection and display of collections. But the resources of DM are of a wide range and belong to different digital museums or individuals. They have the characteristics of geographical distribution, storage heterogeneity, morphological diversity and autonomy management. The resources of DM also involve a variety of different areas. All the above makes sharing and managing the resources more complex. Moreover, in these museums which contain thousands of heterogeneous, distributed in different geographical location and all types of resources, how to effectively discover and access the distributed heterogeneous resources, and based on these resources to build and display richer digital media content is an urgent and important issue to resolve.So based on the early museum digitization and under the financial support from "ChinaGrid" and "University Digital Museum Grid (UDMGrid)", the thesis focuses on the researches of the resource modeling of DM, the virtualization of DM resources, the distributed heterogeneous data integration in DM, service customization and so on. And the application instances of customized interface and personal museum are also presented in this thesis.The main contributions of the thesis are as follows: 1. Establish the representation model of DM resourcesThe resources of DM are of a variety of data types and the amount of data is huge. The all kinds of applications'development in DM are carried out around the resources. The thesis analyzes the characteristics of the resources of DM and with the basis of it establishes the representation model of DM resources. The model is an interactive, multi-level, multi-dimensional model centered with resources. The model presents a detailed analysis of the resources'basic properties, the museum properties, use properties and extended properties. And from the perspective of the use of resources the thesis describes the relationships between the resources.2. Propose the virtualization method of DM resourcesAccording to the classifications and characteristics of the DM resources, the thesis proposes the virtualization method applied to DM. The approach divides the DM resources into three layers, which are resource layer, physical service layer and logical service layer. For the characteristics of the DM applications the logical service layer is divided into simple service and composition service. Virtualization enables the resources of DM have different expression forms on different abstraction level which meet the needs of resources sharing in DM. And a service composition method which applied to DM resources has been presented in this thesis, which increases the flexibility of service composition and enables fast and flexible generation of personalized digital media applications.3. Propose a distributed heterogenous data integration methodThe thesis proposes the OGSA-DAI based distributed heterogeneous data integration method and service customization method. On the physical service layer the DM resources can be encapsulated as data services which can be found in the network environment and can enable user access distributed heterogeneous data resources transparently. And based on the service encapsulation, the method supports process modeling, selection and matching of candidate services, using fine-grained data services to assemble complex application services.4. Propose the customized interface modelIn order to achieve the most effective display form to users, make users be satisfied with the visit, attract more users to come to visit and improve the availability of DM, the thesis propose the customized interface model. The model is composed of representation layer, operation layer and data layer. The interface customization includes the customization of interface layout, the customization of interface content and style. The customization of the interface layout includes the overall interface structure and interface layout, and the customization of interface content includes the customization of display information and characteristics.On the basis of the above research work and according to the need of a variety of applications, the further work is to improve the DM resource presentation model and investigate the effective generation method for personalized interface to meet the needs of different groups and different application background.