Virtual Museums on the Information Superhighway: Prospects and Potholes Maria Milosavljevic † , Robert Dale ‡ , Stephen J Green ‡ , Cécile Paris † and Sandra Williams ‡ † Intelligent Interactive Technologies Group CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences Locked Bag 17 Sydney NSW 1670 Australia Email: {Maria.Milosavljevic,Cecile.Paris}@cmis.csiro.au ‡ MRI Language Technology Group Macquarie University Sydney NSW 2109 Australia Email: {rdale,sjgreen,swilliam}@mri.mq.edu.au Abstract Museum labels are written according to the assumed knowledge and needs of a single restricted audience model. However, each visitor has unique reasons for visiting a museum or for being attracted to a particular exhibit. In addition, each visitor has unique knowledge, abilities, needs and limitations. In order to make labels more informative, interesting and useful to the individual visitor, labels must become dynamic; that is, a label must be able to be different things to different people, according to their needs. In this paper, we describe the use of natural language generation technology in the construction of personalised virtual museum labels which are constructed on-the-fly by a system with a specific person’s needs in mind. The key point here, is that the description of a museum object can automatically adapt to the individual user. We call the result of this technology DYNAMIC HYPERTEXT. We highlight the benefits which arise from using this approach in the domain of museums: labels can be tailored more precisely to an individual's needs and background, not only in terms of the links to other interesting items in the museum, but more importantly, the descriptions of items themselves can be tailored to the user, thus making their visit a far more interesting and rewarding experience. 1. Introduction With the fast uptake of Internet-based technologies, many businesses are grappling with a major paradigm shift in order to firm up their future business models. By embracing the use of the Internet within and outside of the museum, museums can (and often do) lead the way in this new world. In particular, we are already seeing extensive use of the web for providing virtual museums. However, most web-based documents are static in nature, and are not able to be tailored to the individual user’s knowledge, needs, abilities and limitations. This severely limits their usefulness, as users may become lost in hyperspace (Conklin, 1987), may not know how to find items of interest, and may not find the descriptions of items in the museum useful. Like other businesses, it is essential that the visitor has a rewarding experience, or they will not return to the museum. In order to overcome this, we, as document authors, may provide multiple versions of documents, or documents with varying levels of descriptions for all the conceivable questions a user might have. However, this task becomes impossible when we are dealing with more than a handful of objects, and more than a few user types. Furthermore, even with such careful authoring, we would not be able to author documents that could take the visitor’s past interactions with the system into account.