The LeMO Project - Development of an Internet Multimedia Information System of 20th Century German History : Aims and Results

The aim of the LeMO project was to create a multimedia information system on 20th century German history in the Internet. This work was carried out in a joint project by the German Historical Museum in Berlin, the Haus der Geschichte of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn and the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST in Berlin. The LeMO system provides various options for accessing its information. With the need to make cultural content attractive to young people in mind, 3D environments have been developed for each period of 20th century history. These presentations constitute a different way of looking at history. Visitors navigate through 3D spaces to the various museum exhibits and can request further multimedia information on historical events (text, images, audio and video material). Access to specific content is also provided via different search capabilities, including a metadata-based search engine. The architecture of the LeMO system is based on Internet technologies (including VRML, HTML, streaming audio/video). This paper describes the aims, concepts, implementations and results of the LeMO project. By the end of 2000, 31 3D environments and over 5000 multimedia web pages covering various periods, topics, chronicles and biographies from German history had been developed for the virtual exhibition ( www.dhm.de/lemo or www.hdg.de/lemo). From 1997-2000 LeMO was a project of the DFN-Verein (Association for the Promotion of a German Research Network) with financial support from Deutsche Telekom T-Nova Berkom GmbH (1997-1998) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (1999-2000).