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

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications

Location-based and contextual mobile learning. A STELLAR Small-Scale Study

This study starts from several inputs that the partners have collected from previous and current running research projects and a workshop organised at the STELLAR Alpine Rendevous 2010. In the study, several steps have been taken, firstly a literature review and analysis of existing systems; secondly, mobile learning experts have been involved in a concept mapping study to identify the main challenges that can be solved via mobile learning; and thirdly, an identification of educational patterns based on these examples has been done. Out of this study the partners aim to develop an educational framework for contextual learning as a unifying approach in the field. Therefore one of our central research questions is: how can we investigate, theorise, model and support contextual learning

Smart ambient:a pilot study to contextualise a location-based mobile application to support informal learning from cultural heritage sites

This paper aims to present a pilot study of the development of a Location-Based Mobile application to support informal learning in the cultural heritage domain. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of the Mobile Location Based System. The application is intended for use in outdoor settings and aims to provide the user with automatic notifications of historical information regarding nearby heritage sites. The application presents the information automatically when the device is close to a certain place or statue while people are moving in the vicinity of those places. The study used a scenario-based method to investigate the actors and the suitable context of use. Finally, an evaluation of the prototype's main features was conducted to examine their usefulness

Adding generic contextual capabilities to wearable computers

Context-awareness has an increasingly important role to play in the development of wearable computing systems. In order to better define this role we have identified four generic contextual capabilities: sensing, adaptation, resource discovery, and augmentation. A prototype application has been constructed to explore how some of these capabilities could be deployed in a wearable system designed to aid an ecologist's observations of giraffe in a Kenyan game reserve. However, despite the benefits of context-awareness demonstrated in this prototype, widespread innovation of these capabilities is currently stifled by the difficulty in obtaining the contextual data. To remedy this situation the Contextual Information Service (CIS) is introduced. Installed on the user's wearable computer, the CIS provides a common point of access for clients to obtain, manipulate and model contextual information independently of the underlying plethora of data formats and sensor interface mechanisms

Mobile information access in the real world: A story of three wireless devices

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2008 ElsevierThe importance of the user perspective to the wireless information access experience cannot be understated: simply put, users will not indulge in devices that are perceived to be difficult to use and in technologies that do not offer quality infotainment – combined information and entertainment – content. In this paper, we investigate the impact that mobile devices have on the user wireless infotainment access experience in practice. To this end, we have undertaken an empirical study placed in a ‘real-world’ setting, in which participants undertook typical infotainment access tasks on three different wireless-enabled mobile devices: a laptop, a personal digital assistant and a head mounted display device. Results show that, with the exception of participants’ level of self-consciousness when using such devices in public environments, the user wireless information access experience is generally unaffected by device type. Location was shown, though, to be a significant factor when users engage in tasks such as listening to online music or navigation. Whilst the interaction between device and environment was found to influence entertainment-related tasks in our experiments, the informational ones were not affected. However, the interaction effects between device and user type was found to affect both types of tasks. Lastly, a user’s particular computing experience was shown to influence the perceived ease of wireless information access only in the case of online searching, irrespective of whether this is done for primarily informational purposes or entertainment ones

The Stick-e Note Architecture: Extending the Interface Beyond the User

This paper proposes a redefinition of the human-computer interface, extending its boundaries to encompass interaction with the user's physical environment. This extension to the interface enables computers to become aware of their context of use and intelligently adapt their activities and interface to suit their current circumstances. Context-awareness promises to greatly enhance user interfaces, but the complexity of capturing, representing and processing contextual data, presents a major obstacle to its further development. The Stick-e Note Architecture is proposed as a solution to this problem, offering a universal means of providing context-awareness through an easily understood metaphor based on the Post-It note