Tag-based user modeling for social multi-device adaptive guides

Abstract

Abstract.This paper aims to demonstrate that the principles of adaptation and user modeling, especially social annotation, can be integrated fruitfully with those of the Web 2.0 paradigm and thereby enhance in the domain of cultural heritage. We propose a framework for improving recommender systems through exploiting the users tagging activity. We maintain that Web 2.0's participative features can be exploited by adaptive web-based systems in order to enrich and extend the user model, improve social navigation and enrich information from a bottom-up perspective. Thus our approach stresses social annotation as a new and powerful kind of feedback and as a way to infer knowledge about users. The prototype implementation of our framework in the domain of cultural heritage is named iCITY. It is serving to demonstrate the validity of our approach and to highlight the benefits of this approach specifically for cultural heritage. iCITY is an adaptive, social, multi-device recommender guide that provides information about the cultural resources and events promoting the cultural heritage in the city of Torino. Our paper first describes this system and then discusses the results of a set of evaluations that were carried out at different stages of the systems development and aimed at validating the framework and implementation of this specific prototype. In particular, we carried out a heuristic evaluation and two sets of usability tests, aimed at checking the usability of the user interface, specifically of the adaptive behavior of the system. Moreover, we conducted evaluations aimed at investigating the role of tags in the definition of the user model and the impact of tags on the accuracy of recommendations. Our results are encouraging.

The effects of transparency on trust in and acceptance of a content-based art recommender

“…These tags can be used to understand patterns in museum visitors and to explore how expert and non-professional vocabularies differ. Carmagnola et al (2008) describe how these tags can also be exploited to improve recommender systems. To provide a personalised experience, it is crucial to elicit accurate user characteristics and align them with the terminology and structures the domain experts in museums use to describe their collections.…”

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

“…As far as the former is concerned, the iCITY tourist guide (Carmagnola et al, 2008) provided recommendations about cultural events and resources to visitors of the city of Torino, either in textual format or over a city map. The system offered multi-device adaptation using XML-based standards for the development of User…”

Choice Architecture for Human-Computer Interaction

“…As a use case for our experiment, we selected iCITY (Carmagnola et al, 2008), a social adaptive website recommending cultural events, since it allows user to rate various items. In iCITY, users are offered personalized event lists, ordered depending on their preferences and on the context.…”