Digitizing those little cards with info on them is an obviously and incredibly useful first step, as you point out -- if only to avoid everyone crowding around them and obstructing people flow.

What's really cool, I think, is that we hear the word "curation" all the time re content online. Because my parents are art historians I usually think of curation first as "exhibition organization." Force of habit I guess. Semanic Museum would really blow that up in a truer sense. But how does the actual structure of a museum fit in? I visualize personal content curation as skimming through RSS feeds, tweets, etc. True curation applied to the museum world would be jumping from something in the collection at the Louvre to something at the Met to something at the Hermitage, right? Or even some enlightened private collectors who are willing to get their objets online.

But maybe not. Still, even if a digital recommendation engine a la Pandora is recommending similar art objects to you, the flow of those recommendations going to be different for each person, so a physical museum can't necessarily be organized that way.

I'd argue that the immediate and most pronounced impact of a museum moving toward Semantic Web will be that the themes of individual exhibitions -- and most collections -- will come more to the forefront. Because you'll have all the biographical data at your fingertips (created when, by whom, creator's bio, some of the why, etc.) the context will be more important.

Thanks Julia.
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