Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Mobile content personalisation using intelligent user profile approach

As there are several limitations using mobile internet, mobile content personalisation seems to be an alternative to enhance the experience of using mobile internet. In this paper, we propose the mobile content personalisation framework to facilitate collaboration between the client and the server. This paper investigates clustering and classification techniques using K-means and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to predict user's desired content and WAP pages based on device's listed-oriented menu approach. We make use of the user profile and user's information ranking matrix to make prediction of the desired information for the user. Experimental results show that it can generate promising prediction. The results show that it works best when used for predicting 1 matched menu item on the screen

Considering the User in the Wireless World

The near future promises significant advances in communication capabilities, but one of the keys to success is the capability understanding of the people with regards to its value and usage. In considering the role of the user in the wireless world of the future, the Human Perspective Working Group (WG1) of the Wireless World Research Forum has gathered input and developed positions in four important areas: methods, processes, and best practices for user-centered research and design; reference frameworks for modeling user needs within the context of wireless systems; user scenario creation and analysis; and user interaction technologies. This article provides an overview of WG1's work in these areas that are critical to ensuring that the future wireless world meets and exceeds the expectations of people in the coming decades

A model for mobile content filtering on non-interactive recommendation systems

To overcome the problem of information overloading in mobile communication, a recommendation system can be used to help mobile device users. However, there are problems relating to sparsity of information from a first-time user in regard to initial rating of the content and the retrieval of relevant items. In order for the user to experience personalized content delivery via the mobile recommendation system, content filtering is necessary. This paper proposes an integrated method by using classification and association rule techniques for extracting knowledge from mobile content in a user's profile. The knowledge can be used to establish a model for new users and first rater on mobile content. The model recommends relevant content in the early stage during the connection based on the user's profile. The proposed method also facilitates association to be generated to link the first rater items to the top items identified from the outcomes of the classification and clustering processes. This can address the problem of sparsity in initial rating and new user's connection for non-interactive recommendation systems

From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work

Position paper on realizing smart products: challenges for Semantic Web technologies

In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies