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

A decision support system for fostering smart energy efficient districts

The role of ICT is becoming prominent in tackling some of the urban societal challenges such as energy wastage and increasing carbon emissions. In this context, the concept of DAREED aims to deliver an integrated decision support system (DSS) to drive energy efficiency and low carbon activities at both a building and district level. The main aim of this paper is to present the technical concept of the Best Practices recommendation component of the DAREED system. This component seeks to compare and identify existing best practices to recommend practical actions to various stakeholders (e.g. building managers, citizens) in order to improve energy performance considering the global needs of a building. This paper also discusses the context of the three field trial sites (based in UK, Spain and Italy) in which the DAREED platform along with the best practices tool is to be tested and validated.This work evolved in the context of the project DAREED (Decision support Advisor for innovative business models and useR engagement for smart Energy Efficient Districts), www.dareed.eu, a project cofunded by the EC within FP7, Grant agreement no: 609082

A review of the role of sensors in mobile context-aware recommendation systems

Recommendation systems are specialized in offering suggestions about specific items of different types (e.g., books, movies, restaurants, and hotels) that could be interesting for the user. They have attracted considerable research attention due to their benefits and also their commercial interest. Particularly, in recent years, the concept of context-aware recommendation system has appeared to emphasize the importance of considering the context of the situations in which the user is involved in order to provide more accurate recommendations. The detection of the context requires the use of sensors of different types, which measure different context variables. Despite the relevant role played by sensors in the development of context-aware recommendation systems, sensors and recommendation approaches are two fields usually studied independently. In this paper, we provide a survey on the use of sensors for recommendation systems. Our contribution can be seen from a double perspective. On the one hand, we overview existing techniques used to detect context factors that could be relevant for recommendation. On the other hand, we illustrate the interest of sensors by considering different recommendation use cases and scenarios

AirTransit Trip Planner Application

The number of flight on transit passenger in Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) had been recorded almost 35 million of people in 2010. This passenger on transit will spend their time at the airport while waiting for the next flight without any planning to visit tourism places nearby due to short period of time and much information needed to plan a short trip. This is such a waste because they actually can boost countries’ economy in the tourism sector if they spend their time to visit some tourism places nearby the airport. Because of that, AirTransit Trip Planner aims to help these passenger on transit by planning a short trip to the nearby tourism places within the transition hour they have. AirTransit Trip Planner is using a mathematical algorithm in order to calculate and suggest how many nearby tourism places a user can visit based on their flight transition time. The algorithm also need to consider the distance of the tourism places from user’s current location and also time taken to go there. Besides the mathematical algorithm used for sorting, AirTransit Trip Planner also using Google Map API as a map to guide user and Google Places API as a data center to grab all the tourism places and its details. The output of this calculation is a suggestion of short trip planner for the user (passenger on transit). The trip planner will list down the tourism places user can visit within their flight transition hour, the distance to go there and also time taken to go there. Indirectly, this AirTransit Trip Planner application also helps to boost economy in the tourism sector of a countr

Controlling services in a mobile context-aware infrastructure

Context-aware application behaviors can be described as logic rules following the Event-Control-Action (ECA) pattern. In this pattern, an Event models an occurrence of interest (e.g., a change in context); Control specifies a condition that must hold prior to the execution of the action; and an Action represents the invocation of arbitrary services. We have defined a Controlling service aiming at facilitating the dynamic configuration of ECA rule specifications by means of a mobile rule engine and a mechanism that distributes context reasoning activities to a network of context processing nodes. In this paper we present a novel context modeling approach that provides application developers and users with more appropriate means to define context information and ECA rules. Our approach makes use of ontologies to model context information and has been developed on top of web services technology

Human-Centric Ontology-Based Context Modelling In Tourism

A lot of work has been done up to now in the so called context-aware research field on the one hand and on the ontology research field on the other. Research has been conducted both considering context-awareness and ontology as clearly distinct research disciplines and also utilizing ontologies as a tool for context management. However, context-based applications have only been possible at a laboratory environment so far and they have always worked under very certain, pre-established pre-requisites in a not very stable nor efficient manner, which actually does not fulfil the nature of Ubiquitous Computing vision. Representation and use of context plays a crucial role in many modern IT applications. The ability to process contextual information and perform context-based reasoning is essential not only for mobile and ubiquitous computing systems, but also for a wide range of tourism applications. This paper presents a novel semantic-based human-centric approach to the notion of context that represents an attempt to make Contextual Computing services available to the general public