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 symposium 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 symposium 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 symposium 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

- Special session: "Culture-Technology-Education"