The debate on issues concerning digital processing and presentation of museum collections, monuments and sites started in the late 90s and it continues today.

Interest now focuses on the relationships between museums, artifacts, digital technologies and the Web (WWW), and their role in the redefinition of the museum itself as “communication engine”. The interaction between real ontologies, the empirical perception of material culture – objects – and their virtual ontologies – the digital representations - creates new perspectives in the domain of data analysis, data sharing, data contextualization and cultural transmission. In this way, every museum is a meta-museum since artifacts, sites and objects exist in relation and interaction with cultural processes. The meta-museum promotes the action of recontextualization of sites and objects, otherwise impossible in an exhibit or museum display. In other words, in the digital domain, a museum artifact is the outcome of a very sophisticated informational and communicational process, contextualized in a virtual network of relations. The museum and its collections are themselves a site or a “sitefact”, because they create new contexts and territories of knowledge.

The international workshop entitled VIRTUAL ARCHAEOLOGY: Museums & Cultural Tourism aims at investigating all new trends in the field of digital (e.g., online, virtual) museums, virtual communities, archaeometric studies, digital cultural tourism and related topics.

The workshop is open to students, museum and cultural heritage professionals, scholars, archaeologists, historians, ethnologists, IT specialists and engineers and others working on digital applications in cultural heritage, public and private museums, etc. The workshop is intended to enable collaborations and projects on Greek and international archaeological case studies.

Topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Visualizing archaeology and heritage in 3D
Virtual Communities
Virtual museums
Virtual, Augmented & Mixed Reality applications
Serious Games
Interaction Design
Museums, Narrative and Virtual Storytelling
Handheld and mobile technologies
Web 2.0 and Social Networking in cultural heritage
Interactive installations in museums and heritage sites
Digital Hermeneutics and Museum Studies
Data mining and digital archives
Data, digitization, documentation
Digital technologies for archeological research
Digital Cultural Tourism
Copyright in the Digital Age
Museum Digital Resource Management
Digital preservation of historical & traditional practices
Quantitative and qualitative evaluation
Virtual Educational approaches
Virtual Archaeometry