A personalized walk through the museum

Abstract

More and more museums aim at enhancing their visitors' museum experiences in a personalized, intensive and engaging way inside the museum. The CHIP1 (Cultural Heritage Information Personalization) project offers various online and mobile tools to the users to be their own curators, e.g. browsing the online collections, planning personalized museum tours, getting recommendations about interesting artworks to see, and quickly finding their ways in the museum. In this paper we present the new version of the personalized museum guide2 offered on a mobile device in the physical museum space. We maintain a dynamic user model to ensure high relevance of recommended artworks and museum tours and in this way (1) support personalized interaction both online and in the museum and (2) provide an intuitive bridge between the online and on-site experiences. We apply semantic Web technologies to enrich the museum collection and guarantee serendipity, novelty and relevance of the recommendations.