Museums play a crucial role in preserving cultural heritage. However, the forms in which they display cultural heritage might not be the most effective at piquing visitors’ interest. Therefore, museums tend to integrate different technologies that aim to create engaging and memorable experiences. In this context, the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technology results particularly promising due to the possibility of implementing smart objects in museums, granting exhibits advanced interaction capabilities. Gamification techniques are also a powerful technique to draw visitors’ attention. These often rely on interactive question-based games. A drawback of such games is that questions must be periodically regenerated, and this is a time-consuming task. To confront these challenges, this paper proposes a low-maintenance gamified smart object platform that automates the creation of questions by exploiting semantic web technologies. The platform has been implemented in a real-life scenario. The results obtained encourage the use of the platform in the museum considered. Therefore, it appears to be a promising work that could be extrapolated and adapted to other kinds of museums or cultural heritage institutions.

Museums have become through time the cultural conscience of nations by preserving cultural heritage. Although cultural heritage provides a valuable form of learning about mankind, the display of exhibits might not pique visitors' interest. In order to provide engaging and appealing experiences, museums have integrated a number of technologies in their environments. Particularly, there are promising results with the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technology, enabling the implementation of smart objects to grant exhibits advanced capabilities. Gamification techniques are also commonly used in cultural heritage scenarios to further draw visitors' attention. On this sense, several museums offer for example interactive question-based games. However, these questions must be periodically renewed and such task is time-consuming given the lack of automation of this procedure.To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lowmaintenance gamified smart object platform to automate the creation of questions about exhibits by exploiting semantic web technologies. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) the design of a gamified smart object platform for museums based on a trivia quiz app; (ii) the automation of question generation schemes for the proposed game; and (iii) the development of a prototype of the proposed platform in a real-life scenario.