Digital Museums in 3D Virtual Environment Figure 5. Visualization of synthetic visitor styles responding to the top, right, and bottom sides of the window. Classification of the aforementioned visiting styles plays a key role in the visiting sub-system of CMS. Beginning with the first-time visitor, the PRG and GA modules can make the first good impression for the museum tour in SL and RL where the sensor script and RFID technology are implemented, respectively. In case of the first-time visitors, the museum has none of their profiles so their movement in the general information hall is monitored and recorded. Conventional clustering methods such as the nearest neighboring, fuzzy c-mean and self-organizing mapping can be ap- plied in this issue. Obviously, the average and variance of visit times stopping over each ex- hibit are different between ant, fish, grasshopper, and butterfly visitors. FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS There are other research fields related to virtual museums such as applications of Geographic In- formation Systems (GIS) and Global Position Sys- tem (GPS) (Heckert, 2009; Tarasoff, Hutcheson & Rhin, 2009; Liberge & Gerlings, 2008; Chan, 2008), low cost systems based on cloud comput- ing and open source softwares (Davidow, 2009; Moad, Bachta & Stein, 2009; Walk, 2009), and multimedia retrieval systems (Marlow, Clough, Ireson, Recuero, Artiles & Debole, 2008). These three main research topics have been a growing trend presented and published in Museums and the Web 2008-2009 although they might not be vital components of digital museums. By contrast, the incorporation of them can be particularly valuable for cultural heritage collections as a result of (1) photos becoming valuable in providing historic records of specific places, (2) a dramatically in- creasing growth of computing power and storage of collections, and (3) a meaningful search tool of still images, sounds, and videos. For example, GIS and GPS can be adopted in an ordinary CIS, UGC, and personalization issues. For the CIS, public users of the system could search the collection based on an address, a neighborhood, keywords, and dates. However, all searches using an address must use a reference to the map, by which users find difficultly the collections by using city and street names prob- ably different between the past and the present. As adopted in UGC, users, who are willing to show their pictures and tell their stories related to a particular place, can easily use their mobiles with GPS to upload them in the system. Lastly, GIS and GPS can be employed in the framework of interweaving the real and virtual museums and, then, applied to the framework of CMS for the navigator and recommender systems. As mentioned in the previous section, edutain- ment (Di Blas, Hazan & Paolini, 2003; Di Blas, Gobbo & Paolini, 2005; Di Blas & Poggi, 2006; Prasolova-Førland, Sourin & Sourina, 2005), social media and recommender systems have been emphasized as the future of virtual muse- ums. Delivering museum context and re-using content for school users have been investigated and examined. How to smoothly integrate the social media in the virtual universities and schools 724