Interactive User Modeling for Personalized Access to Museum Collections: The Rijksmuseum Case Study

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we present an approach for personalized access to museum collections. We use a RDF/OWL specification of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam collections as a driver for an interactive dialog. The user gives his/her judgment on the artefacts, indicating likes or dislikes. The elicited user model is further used for generating recommendations of artefacts and topics. In this way we support exploration and discovery of information in museum collections. A user study provided insights in characteristics of our target user group, and showed how novice and expert users employ their background knowledge and implicit interest in order to elicit their art preference in the museum collections.

Recommendations based on semantically enriched museum collections

“…prior knowledge of the museum collection, frequency of visiting the museum, interest in art) collected from the questionnaire to distinguish between novice and expert users. As reported in [10], the results confirmed our hypothesis, a significant increase of precision was found for novices, while there is a slight increase for experts. However, the distinction between novices and experts is not clear-cut.…”

“…Ruotsalo and Hyvönen proposed an event-based [9] recommendation strategy that utilizes topics from multiple domain ontologies to enhance the relevance precision. In CHIP we have deployed a content-based [10] strategy, which uses users' ratings on both artworks and art topics in a semantically enriched museum collection.…”

“…In CHIP, we follow a twofold approach. On the one hand, we build a non-obtrusive and interactive rating dialog [12] to allow for a quick instantiation of the user model, and, on the other hand, we realize this dialog over the most representative samples for the collection of artworks in order to enable a fast population of ratings on artworks and topics [10]. (iii) Supporting recommendation presentation and explanation Due to the heterogeneous character of the data, it is becoming more and more important to facilitate navigation and search in multi-dimensional collections [13].…”

“…The goal of the first evaluation [10] is to test the effectiveness of the content-based recommendations with the CHIP Art Recommender. 39 Rijksmuseum visitors participated in this study with an observer.…”

“…To test the hypothesis, we have compared the precision of user's topics of interest before and after using the Art Recommender (rating and getting recommendations) [10]. Looking at the wide variety of users, we defined an expert-value as a weighted sum of user's personal factors (e.g.…”