ARCHAI

ARCHAI is an open-source, sovereign semantic interface for cultural heritage — an active research toolkit designed to sit above existing CMS and DAMS infrastructure. Institutions can run semantic search, grounded collection interpretation, spatial tools, accessibility support, and visitor engagement on their own network and under their own governance.

The current research corpus contains 3,147 records across museum, heritage, public-art, library, archive, and cultural-data sources. Its public-art layer gives the demo a place for street art, murals, civic commissions, precinct works, and social-practice records alongside museum and archive material. The wider source network includes Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons / Wikidata, Trove / National Library of Australia, Digital Public Library of America, and Internet Archive, bringing library, archive, civic-memory, open-media, born-digital, and linked-data context into the ARCHAI ecology. Staff can search the complete metadata layer; public interfaces use a separate rights and media-health gate so a connected record is not automatically treated as reusable visitor media.

AUXIO offers optional factual, third-person, and era-informed interpretation modes through NFC, QR, hyperlink, map, or location-aware exhibition triggers. The working audio interface supports microphone questions and spoken replies through browser speech services, opening the prototype to detected browser languages on supported devices, with further accessibility and multilingual testing in development.

The data format powering each conversation is Obtext (Object Context) — a structured record containing identity, physical properties, temporal context, significance, and crucially, constraints — what the object explicitly does not know.

ARCHAI remains an active research prototype. This website is a public-facing demo layer rather than the full operational app. FAMTEC is open to funded research partnerships, institutional pilots, accessibility testing, collection-data collaborations, development support, and evaluation with museum, gallery, archive, and university teams, and looks forward to collaborating, growing, learning, researching, and testing with partners across the wider GLAM sector.

Developed as part of doctoral research at RMIT University, School of Design. The research paper was accepted for the 6th Summit on New Media Art Archiving (ISEA2026 Dubai).