Mobile Museum Companion

Overview

Museum applications can expose a large amount of information while still making discovery difficult on a mobile device. This companion supports visitors as they discover artworks, follow tours, save content, and access contextual information.

It combines structured museum data with a more exploratory visitor experience instead of acting only as a digital catalog.

Inputs & Constraints

• Artworks metadata tours and saved items
• User accounts and navigation information
• Simple interaction while visitors move through a museum
• Conceptual search beyond exact keywords

Approach

The mobile client was built with SwiftUI. NestJS provides backend APIs and PostgreSQL stores structured application data.

The application includes artwork discovery, tour browsing, saved content, authentication, and museum-oriented navigation features.

A ChromaDB-backed retrieval prototype experiments with semantic artwork search and contextual retrieval for a lightweight museum question-answering workflow.

Outcome

The result is a functioning mobile and backend application covering the main museum companion workflows while demonstrating how semantic retrieval can complement conventional search.

The semantic component remains a prototype, not a production AI system. Its value is showing how structured data and vector-based retrieval can coexist in one product.

What I Learned

• SwiftUI application structure
• Mobile and backend communication
• Authentication flows and API design
• Relational data modeling
• Semantic retrieval
• Integrating experimental features without dominating the core application

Practical Application

• Galleries
• Historical sites
• Tourism applications
• University campuses
• Exhibitions and cultural archives

Tech Stack

• SwiftUI
• NestJS
• PostgreSQL
• ChromaDB