Dynamic hypermedia from a museum database: The Gold of Greece Application

Cultural interactive hypermedia are typically developed as stand-alone applications, with information stored within application-specific structures for a predefined delivery medium. Yet cultural data collection involves an enormous amount of effort for the organisation involved, and cannot be justified as an ad hoc effort related with a single hypermedia presentation (Dallas, 1992); in fact, this is a major limiting factor for museum involvement in developing cultural hypermedia. On the other hand, the latest generation of museum information systems addresses the need for complex, specialised information structuring and for the incorporation of heterogeneous media within museum databases (some institutions already store large numbers of images in electronic format), and makes it feasible that these will become integrated repositories of all relevant information about museum objects.