User-centered design for personalized access to cultural heritage

The volume of digital cultural heritage is huge and rapidly growing. The overload of art information has created the need to help people find out what they like in the enormous museum collections and provide them with the most convenient access point. In this paper, we present a research plan to address these issues. Our approach involves: (1) use of ontologies as shared vocabularies and thesauri to model the domain of art; (2) an interactive ontology-based elicitation of user interests and preferences in art to be stored as an extended overlay user model; (3) RDF/OWL reasoning strategies for predicting users’ interests and generating recommendations; and (4) The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam use case for a personalized museum tour combining both the virtual Web space and the physical museum space to enhance the users’ experience. We follow a user-centered design for collecting requirements, testing out design choices and evaluating stages of our prototypes