Proceedings of Museums and the Web 2004 (MW2004), Arlington, Virginia, USA, March 31 – April 3, 2004 (forthcoming). MuseumFinland — Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web User’s Perspective Eero Hyvönen, Miikka Junnila, Suvi Kettula, Eetu Mäkelä, Samppa Saarela, Mirva Salminen, Ahti Syreeni, Arttu Valo, and Kim Viljanen Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) University of Helsinki P.O. Box 26, 00014 UNIV. OF HELSINKI, Finland Email: firstname.lastname@cs.helsinki.fi http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/seco/ Abstract This paper presents a semantic portal, MuseumFinland, for publishing heterogeneous museum collections on the Semantic Web. The application is presented from the viewpoints of the end-user and the museums providing the contents. By semantic web techniques, it is possible to make collections semantically interoperable and provide the museum visitors with intelligent content-based search and browsing services to the global collection base. By using the MuseumFinland approach the museums with their semantically rich and interrelated collection content can create consolidated semantic collection portals together on the web. Why Museums on the Semantic Web? A special characteristic of cultural collection contents is semantic richness. Collection items have a history and are related in many ways to our environment, to the society, and to other collection items. For example, a chair may be made of oak and leather, may be of a certain style, was designed by a famous designer, was manufactured by a certain company during a time period, was used in a certain castle together with other pieces of furniture, and so on. Other collection items, locations, time periods, designers, companies etc. can be related to the chair through their properties and implicitly constitute a complicated semantic network of associations. This semantic network is not limited to a single collections but spans over other related collections in other museums. The Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001; Fensel et al., 2002) is the next generation of the Web where the contents are meant not only to a human reader but for the machines to