Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Co-creation in Virtual Museums

This paper gives an overview on crowdsourcing practices in virtual museums. Engaged nonprofessionals and specialists support curators in creating digital 2D or 3D exhibits, exhibitions and tour planning and enhancement of metadata using the Virtual Museum and Cultural Object Exchange Format (ViMCOX). ViMCOX provides the semantic structure of exhibitions and complete museums and includes new features, such as room and outdoor design, interactions with artwork, path planning and dissemination and presentation of contents. Application examples show the impact of crowdsourcing in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago de Chile and in the virtual museum depicting the life and work of the Jewish sculptor Leopold Fleischhacker. A further use case is devoted to crowd-based support for restoration of high-quality 3D shapes.