Location based modelling for Heritage Mobile Applications

Recent strategies for increasing museum income have heightened the need to motivate visits. Consequently, ICT has been increasingly used in historical locations to educate and entertain visitors. This exploratory study concerns one such museum that is developing its understanding of these technologies through the perspective of visitors as the key stakeholder. It views the significance of historical landscapes’ technologies that reflect the views of visitors. A quantitative study is conducted to explore preferred technologies and the way in which digital media can be presented in a natural environment, as well as how visitors prefer such experiences to be described. To define and assess the technologies in Dorset County Museum and Maiden Castle, data was collected using a survey in both locations. The results identified differences in visitors’ perceptions regarding the importance of technologies in these museum and physical locations. The outcomes of this study can be applied to improve the effectiveness of technology in interlinked heritage landscapes through development of mobile or web prototypes

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

Toward a model of computational attention based on expressive behavior: applications to cultural heritage scenarios

Our project goals consisted in the development of attention-based analysis of human expressive behavior and the implementation of real-time algorithm in EyesWeb XMI in order to improve naturalness of human-computer interaction and context-based monitoring of human behavior. To this aim, perceptual-model that mimic human attentional processes was developed for expressivity analysis and modeled by entropy. Museum scenarios were selected as an ecological test-bed to elaborate three experiments that focus on visitor profiling and visitors flow regulation

Service-oriented Context-aware Framework

Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware, client-service type application development and use. Location information is combined with other contexts such as the users' history, preferences and disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment (e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location data of various sources

A hely nem elég

Asztali és mobil környezetben egyaránt egyre több helyfüggő és kontextusszenzitív szolgáltatással találkozhatnak a felhasználók, de ezen szolgáltatások általában nem elég hasznosak, igénybevételük sokszor nehézkes. Kutatásaink során egy olyan rendszer tervezésével és kifejlesztésével foglalkozunk, mely segít az összetett helyfüggő és kontextusszenzitív szolgáltatások és kliens-szerver jellegű alkalmazások fejlesztésében és felhasználásában. Számos olyan alkalmazás létezik, mely képes alkalmazni vagy a felhasználó pozícióját vagy más jellemzőjét. A mobilszolgáltatások terén elterjedt az aktuális pozíciót figyelembe venni, a számítógépes alkalmazások pedig szinte minden esetben használják a felhasználó beállításait. Igazán érdekes és értékes szolgáltatásokat azonban a felhasználó kölönféle jellemzőinek és körölményeinek az együttes felhasználásával lehet készíteni; ez a koncepció adja rendszerünk értékét és egyediségét

Campus Memories: Learning with Contextualised Blogging

De Jong, T., Al Takrouri, B., Specht, M., Koper, R. (2007). Campus Memories: Learning with Contextualised Blogging. In D. Griffiths, R. Koper & O. Liber (Eds). Proceedings of The 2nd TenCompetence Workshop (pp. 59-67), January 11-12, 2007, Manchester, United Kingdom.Combining the strengths of both mobile and context aware systems and applying them to educational systems can lead to contextualised learning support (Zimmermann, Lorenz, & Specht, 2005). Mobile blogging applications have become popular as an instant way of accessing and collecting personal memories and blog entries from mobile devices. In the following paper we will present an extension of current systems for blogging we call contextualised blogging. The described conceptual model and architecture allows users to create and manage blogs from a mobile device and combine them with identification tags and therefore leave “blog traces” in a physical environment.This work has been sponsored by the EU project TENCompetenc

Situating approaches to museum guides for families and groups

In this paper, we analyze the current state of museum guide technologies and applications in order to develop an analytical foundation for our future research in an adaptive museum guide for families. We have focused our analysis on three critical areas of interest in considering group and social interaction in museums: tangibility, the role of tangible user interfaces; interaction, visit types and visit flows; adaptivity, user modeling approaches

Personalisation of digital museum guides through implicit recognition of visitor personas

Digital museum guides promise a transformed visitor experience through greater engagement with the museum content and activities. Realising that promise turns on the personalisation of digital guides, particularly in museum contexts where rich content is accessed by a highly diverse visitor population. Since users of a museum guide are typically first time users and since their usage is for a relatively short session, personalisation must use initial interaction data to associate the user with a particular persona and thereby infer other facts about the user’s preferences and needs. Two research aims follow: first to better understand the requirements of different visitor personas, and second, to develop methods for unobtrusively detecting a user’s persona from their interactions with a guide and their activity in the museum space. This paper presents the design of a research programme for: first, investigating mechanisms for automatic adaptation of digital museum guides based on identifying a visitor’s persona category from interaction data; second, exploring the requirements of different visitor categories to derive the user interface adaptation, and; third, investigating the effectiveness of this adaptation on the museum visitor’s experience

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