A Framework for Recommending Multimedia Cultural Visiting Paths

In this work, we present a general framework for Cultural Heritage applications able to uniformly manage heterogeneous multimedia data coming from several web repositories and to provide context- Aware recommendation services in order to generate dynamic multimedia visiting paths useful for the users during the exploration of different kinds of cultural sites. A specific application of our system within the cultural heritage domain is proposed together with some experimental results

TellEat: sharing experiences on the move

In a context where, due to the proliferation of mobile devices, virtual social environments on the Web are taking up a very concrete role in the way people experience their surroundings, the Future Internet seems to be headed toward a mixture of Social Web, Semantic Web and Augmented Reality. As a part of a larger project that aims at building a social network of both people and things, we designed and developed TellEat, an iPhone-based application that allows users in mobility to share facts concerning people or objects that participate in the social network, and to discover pertinent events that have been told by others. In this paper we discuss both the client application, with the interaction model and interface metaphors that have been designed to make the experience as playful as possible for users, and the server-side services that provide the necessary knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. We also present the results of preliminary tests with users

AXMEDIS 2008

The AXMEDIS International Conference series aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, impacts and exploitation. The AXMEDIS events offer venues for exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research and also benefit business and industrial communities. In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage

The Internet of Things supporting the Cultural Heritage domain: analysis, design and implementation of a smart framework enhancing the smartness of cultural spaces

Nowadays embedded systems have reached a great level of maturity and diffusion thanks to their small size, low power consumption, large connectivity and variety of application in everyday contexts. These systems, if properly structured and configured, can signifi- cantly increase the smartness of the environments where they are deployed, monitoring and continuously collecting data to be processed and elaborated. In this perspective, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm supports the transition from a closed world, in which an object is characterized by a descriptor, to an open world, in which objects interact with the surrounding environment, because they have become ”intelligent”. Accordingly, not only people will be connected to the internet, but objects such as cars, fridges, televisions, water management systems, buildings, monuments and so on will be connected as well. The Cultural Heritage represents a worldwide resource of inestimable value, attracting millions of visitors every year to monuments, museums and art exhi- bitions. Fundamental aspects of this resource to be investigated are its promotion and people enjoyment. Indeed, to achieve an enjoyment of a cultural space that is attractive and sustainable, it is necessary to realize ubiquitous and multimedia solutions for users’ interaction to enrich their visiting experience and improve the knowledge transmission process of a cultural site. The main target of this PhD Thesis is the study of the IoT paradigm, devoted to the design of a smart framework supporting the fruition, enjoyment and tutelage of the Cultural Heritage domain. In order to assess the proposed approach, a real case study is presented and discussed. In detail, it represents the deployment of our framework during an art exhibition, named The Beauty or the Truth within the Monumental Complex of San Domenico Maggiore, Naples (Italy). Following the Internet of Things paradigm, the proposed intelligent framework relies on the integration of a Sensor Network of Smart Objects with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy technologies to identify, locate and support users. In this way technology can become a mediator between visitors and fruition, an instrument of connection between people, objects, and spaces to create new social, economic and cultural opportunities

An Approach for Curating Collections of Historical Documents with the Use of Topic Detection Technologies

Digital curation of materials available in large online repositories is required to enable the reuse of Cultural Heritage resources in specific activities like education or scientific research. The digitization of such valuable objects is an important task for making them accessible through digital platforms such as Europeana, therefore ensuring the success of transcription campaigns via the Transcribathon platform is highly important for this goal. Based on impact assessment results, people are more engaged in the transcription process if the content is more oriented to specific themes, such as First World War. Currently, efforts to group related documents into thematic collections are in general hand-crafted and due to the large ingestion of new material they are difficult to maintain and update. The current solutions based on text retrieval are not able to support the discovery of related content since the existing collections are multi-lingual and contain heterogeneous items like postcards, letters, journals, photographs etc. Technological advances in natural language understanding and in data management have led to the automation of document categorization and via automatic topic detection. To use existing topic detection technologies on Europeana collections there are several challenges to be addressed: (1) ensure representative and qualitative training data, (2) ensure the quality of the learned topics, and (3) efficient and scalable solutions for searching related content based on the automatically detected topics, and for suggesting the most relevant topics on new items. This paper describes in more details each such challenge and the proposed solutions thus offering a novel perspective on how digital curation practices can be enhanced with the help of machine learning technologies

A Storytelling-Driven Framework for Cultural Heritage Dissemination

This paper aims at introducing a new dissemination framework for cultural heritage (CH) making possible affordable solutions for small and medium museums to cooperate/collaborate in the creation of exhibitions. The framework also makes possible new data-based communication strategies able to combine content belonging to different cultural archives and accessed through an ontology-based integration and discovery mechanism, and fosters new data sharing and distribution policies that preserve intellectual property rights. The proposed dissemination model redefines the concept of digital storytelling with the aim of increasing the participation of domain experts in the dissemination of CH. The framework is designed around a graph-based architecture for creating attractive and engaging multimedia narratives that will be transformed in real experiences personalized according to the user\u2019s profile, interests and context of use. Recommender and digital right management services are provided to authors and users for helping them in the creation, personalization and navigation of stories and for guaranteeing the adoption of suitable sharing and distribution policies

Semantically-enhanced recommendations in cultural heritage

In the Web 2.0 environment, institutes and organizations are starting to open up their previously isolated and heterogeneous collections in order to provide visitors with maximal access. Semantic Web technologies act as instrumental in integrating these rich collections of metadata by defining ontologies which accommodate different representation schemata and inconsistent naming conventions over the various vocabularies. Facing the large amount of metadata with complex semantic structures, it is becoming more and more important to support visitors with a proper selection and presentation of information. In this context, the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) funded the Cultural Heritage Information Personalization (CHIP) project in early 2005, as part of the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH) program in the Netherlands. It is a collaborative project between the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Telematica Instituut. The problem statement that guides the research of this thesis is as follows: Can we support visitors with personalized access to semantically-enriched collections? To study this question, we chose cultural heritage (museums) as an application domain, and the semantically rich background knowledge about the museum collection provides a basis to our research. On top of it, we deployed user modeling and recommendation technologies in order to provide personalized services for museum visitors. Our main contributions are: (i) we developed an interactive rating dialog of artworks and art concepts for a quick instantiation of the CHIP user model, which is built as a specialization of FOAF and mapped to an existing event model ontology SEM; (ii) we proposed a hybrid recommendation algorithm, combining both explicit and implicit relations from the semantic structure of the collection. On the presentation level, we developed three tools for end-users: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Following a user-centered design cycle, we performed a series of evaluations with museum visitors to test the effectiveness of recommendations using the rating dialog, different ways to build an optimal user model and the prediction accuracy of the hybrid algorithm. Chapter 1 introduces the research questions, our approaches and the outline of this thesis. Chapter 2 gives an overview of our work at the first stage. It includes (i) the semantic enrichment of the Rijksmuseum collection, which is mapped to three Getty vocabularies (ULAN, AAT, TGN) and the Iconclass thesaurus; (ii) the minimal user model ontology defined as a specialization of FOAF, which only stores user ratings at that time, (iii) the first implementation of the content-based recommendation algorithm in our first tool, the CHIP Art Recommender. Chapter 3 presents two other tools: Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the user's ratings, the Web-based Tour Wizard recommends museum tours consisting of recommended artworks that are currently available for museum exhibitions. The Mobile Tour Guide converts recommended tours to mobile devices (e.g. PDA) that can be used in the physical museum space. To connect users' various interactions with these tools, we made a conversion of the online user model stored in RDF into XML format which the mobile guide can parse, and in this way we keep the online and on-site user models dynamically synchronized. Chapter 4 presents the second generation of the Mobile Tour Guide with a real time routing system on different mobile devices (e.g. iPod). Compared with the first generation, it can adapt museum tours based on the user's ratings artworks and concepts, her/his current location in the physical museum and the coordinates of the artworks and rooms in the museum. In addition, we mapped the CHIP user model to an existing event model ontology SEM. Besides ratings, it can store additional user activities, such as following a tour and viewing artworks. Chapter 5 identifies a number of semantic relations within one vocabulary (e.g. a concept has a broader/narrower concept) and across multiple vocabularies (e.g. an artist is associated to an art style). We applied all these relations as well as the basic artwork features in content-based recommendations and compared all of them in terms of usefulness. This investigation also enables us to look at the combined use of artwork features and semantic relations in sequence and derive user navigation patterns. Chapter 6 defines the task of personalized recommendations and decomposes the task into a number of inference steps for ontology-based recommender systems, from a perspective of knowledge engineering. We proposed a hybrid approach combining both explicit and implicit recommendations. The explicit relations include artworks features and semantic relations with preliminary weights which are derived from the evaluation in Chapter 5. The implicit relations are built between art concepts based on instance-based ontology matching. Chapter 7 gives an example of reusing user interaction data generated by one application into another one for providing cross-application recommendations. In this example, user tagging about cultural events, gathered by iCITY, is used to enrich the user model for generating content-based recommendations in the CHIP Art Recommender. To realize full tagging interoperability, we investigated the problems that arise in mapping user tags to domain ontologies, and proposed additional mechanisms, such as the use of SKOS matching operators to deal with the possible mis-alignment of tags and domain-specific ontologies. We summarized to what extent the problem statement and each of the research questions are answered in Chapter 8. We also discussed a number of limitations in our research and looked ahead at what may follow as future work