A service-orientation and open-source approach to developing virtual museums

This chapter discusses how modern web technologies can be effectively used to present museums’ disparate cultural objects in digital space as aggregated collections in a virtual museum (VM) using service-orientation. We show how innovative open-source technologies and methods, including developing a bespoke application programming interface (API), allow a museum to exploit service-orientation to improve access to its collections. By publishing an API, a museum allows third parties (i.e. the “app community”) to create interesting VMs that can bring similar collections from different museums together in digital space. An example of such an aggregated collection is the Reanimating Cultural Heritage collection of Sierra Leone material culture. 1 Another interesting innovation, in the development of VMs, is the integration of 3D in a typical web technology stack to enable interaction with an object “in the round” thereby giving visitors a more interesting experience. The technology for integrating 3D into a website is referred to as a Web3D technology stack.