Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

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

Shared Digital Experiences Supporting Collaborative Meaning-Making at Heritage Sites

A growing body of research testifies to the capacity for archaeological and other cultural heritage sites to generate wonder, attachment, personal transformation and restoration, family bonding and community building amongst their visitors. Using evaluation data from two related European Commission‐funded research projects, CHESS and EMOTIVE, we discuss here our work in developing mobile-based emotionally‐engaging digital stories for visitors to diverse cultural heritage sites. The sites range from world-renowned museums, such as the Acropolis Museum in Athens (Greece), to UNESCO World Heritage sites, such as the Çatalhöyük Neolithic archeological site (in Turkey). The evaluation studies feature detailed observations of visitors on‐site as well as post‐experience questionnaires and interviews, providing us with rich data on several axes; e.g. in relation to interactive story plot and narration, staging and wayfinding in the physical space, personalisation and social interaction. In this chapter, we specifically focus on shared experience and the impact that digital technology can have in promoting the cultural site as a social space. On the one hand, our findings testify that digital empathic stories can evoke narrative transportation, and even, in some cases, personal attachment and critical (self‐)reflection, which leads us to consider how their enchanting capacities might be pushed even further into the building of broader, collective social conscience. At the same time, the findings reveal the challenges, both conceptual and practical, of designing a shared digital experience in which visitors engage with the site and each other in meaningful ways

Profiling Attitudes for Personalized Information Provision

PAROS is a generic system under design whose goal is to offer personalization, recommendation, and other adaptation services to information providing systems. In its heart lies a rich user model able to capture several diverse aspects of user behavior, interests, preferences, and other attitudes. The user model is instantiated with profiles of users, which are obtained by analyzing and appropriately interpreting potentially arbitrary pieces of user-relevant information coming from diverse sources. These profiles are maintained by the system, updated incrementally as additional data on users becomes available, and used by a variety of information systems to adapt the functionality to the users’ characteristics

DL.org Digital Library Conformance Checklist

This work has been partially supported by DL.org (December 2008-February 2011), a Coordination and support action, received funding from the Commission of the European Union (EC) under the 7th Framework Programme ICT Thematic Area “Digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning” through the EC’s Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning Unit

Digital library reference model - in a nutshell

This work has been partially supported by DL.org (December 2008-February 2011), a Coordination and support action, received funding from the Commission of the European Union (EC) under the 7th Framework Programme ICT Thematic Area “Digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning” through the EC’s Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning Unit

DL.org Digital Library Manifesto

This booklet is abstracted and abridged from “The Digital Library Reference Model”, D3.2b DL.org Project Deliverable, April 2011. This work has been partially supported by DL.org (December 2008-February 2011), a Coordination and support action, received funding from the Commission of the European Union (EC) under the 7th Framework Programme ICT Thematic Area “Digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning” through the EC’s Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning Unit

From the web of data to a world of action

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 8.4 (2010): 10.1016/j.websem.2010.04.007This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring 'typing' of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.Parts of this work were supported by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Program of the European Commission as part of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (Contract G038- 507618). Thanks also to Emanuele Tracanna, Marco Piva, and Raffaele Giuliano for their work on On Time

Teenage Visitor Experience: Classification of Behavioral Dynamics in Museums

Teenagers' engagement in museums is much talked about but little research has been done to understand their behavior and inform design. Findings from co-design sessions with teenagers suggested they value games and stories when thinking about enjoyable museum tours. Informed by these findings and working with a natural history museum, we designed: a story-based tour (Turning Point) and a game-based tour (Haunted Encounters), informed by similar content. The two strategies were evaluated with 78 teenagers (15-19 years old) visiting the museum as part of an educational school trip. We assessed teenagers' personality in class; qualitative and quantitative data on their engagement, experience, and usability of the apps were collected at the museum. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data show personality traits mapping into different behaviors. We offer implications for the design of museum apps targeted to teenagers, a group known as difficult to reach