A sample domain: Museum guided tours

A central attraction of the hypertext interface is its suitability for the task of information browsing. By following hyperlinks, the information seeker (i.e. the user) can easily navigate to new areas of interest. At the same time, for the reasons already mentioned, there are advantages in being able to provide the information requested by the user in a dynamic fashion. If we look for an analogy in the real world to the kind of interface we are aiming for, an interesting candidate is the dialogue between a museum tour guide and a browsing visitor. The ILEX (Intelligent Labelling Explorer) project has been set up to study this domain, and to reproduce some of its distinctive features in a hypertext system. To achieve this goal, our system must:

Support mixed initiative dialogue

There is a degree of `dialogic' interaction between the tour-guide and the visitor. While there are quite restricted directions that the conversation can take, each party can take the initiative in pursuing a direction.

Be interesting

The visitor is free to ask about whichever objects take his fancy; if an object does not hold his interest, he will move on to another, or finish.

Be informative

The system has all the information, and has the goal of getting across some basic messages about the content of the gallery.

 

 

Figure 1: Part of the `Curator-of-Oz' transcripts

 

 

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Figure 2: A Sample Hyper-Tour
 

 

  (def-story
    :id 'PAPER-1
    :trigger 'PAPER
    :type :PROPERTY
    :message 'MANY-KINDS-OF-JEWELLERY
    :singular-label "item made of paper"
    :plural-label "items made of paper"
    :text "Jewellery need not be made of metal. This item, quite unusually,
           is made from paper. This shows that a wide range of materials can 
           be used and still be called `jewellery'.")

Our point of departure has been to gather transcripts of real guided tours, in collaboration with the National Museums of Scotland. We ran two `Curator-of-Oz' interviews, where a curator of the modern jewellery gallery was asked to talk about a series of objects in response to simple prompts from a visitor. Figure 1 shows an extract from one such interview. V is the visitor, and G is the guide. Based on the information extracted from these tours, and additional database material, a mocked-up prototype system ILEX-0 generates hypertext pages; for a sample page, see Figure 2.

ILEX-0 is still far from generating discourse of the sophistication shown by a real museum curator. But it should be clear that any hypertext system designed to simulate such discourse must make use of a dynamic generation component of some sort. In the following section, we consider the kinds of flexibility which this component should ideally provide.