Cooperation Metaphors for Virtual Museums

Abstract

Cooperation Metaphors are set of rules to support interaction and collaboration between users who want to explore complex content and information together. The rules determine how the collaborative community can be created and managed, how every member of the community can operate on his/her own or can cooperate with other members. Different types of situations, tasks and user roles determine different behaviors and therefore need different metaphors. The paper will present the general issue, describing in general what cooperation metaphors are and how they can be defined. A number of examples, related to typical activities for virtual museums (i.e. museums on the web) will be used in order to give a practical understanding of what cooperation is, or can be. The paper will also argue that virtual metaphors do not necessarily imitate real-life, but can introduce innovative and unexpected features. Virtual metaphors, in fact, lack some of the features of real-life cooperation, but, on the other hand, can also offer unexpected, powerful and effective possibilities, not available in (traditional) real-life. Finally the paper will describe how collaborative activities for virtual museums can be implemented in today's tools and applications for collaboration in the web, such as Net2gether, Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds, and the WebTalk series. KEYWORDS Collaboration, Virtual Museums, CSCW, CSCL, Virtual Reality 1

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