ABSTRACT
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. It shows how innovative open-source technologies and methods, including developing a bespoke application programming interface (API), and allows a museum to exploit service-orientation to improve access to its collections. A VM should render on a mobile device because most museum visitors will have a smartphone with integrated high-resolution cameras and web browsers capable of displaying 3D objects. One of the most interesting technology approaches available to facilitate the design of VMs is the concept of service-orientation, service-oriented architectures and API. A service-orientated architecture can be simply described as an “architectural design pattern in which application components provide services to other components via a computer protocol”.
