The main objective of the CHIP project is to demonstrate how Semantic Web technologies can be deployed to provide personalized access to digital museum collections. We illustrate our approach with the digital database ARIA of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam5. For the semantic enrichment of the Rijksmuseum ARIA database we collaborated with the CATCH STITCH project6 to produce mappings to Iconclass7, and with the MultimediaN E-culture project8 to produce the RDF/OWL of the ARIA and Adlib databases. The main focus of CHIP is on exploring the potential of applying adaptation techniques to provide personalized experience for the museum visitors both on the Web site and in the museum. This resulted in three demonstrator components: - Artwork Recommender - a Web-based rating dialog to build a user profile, based on semantics-driven recommendations. - Tour Wizard - a Web-based tool using the user profile to generate automatically personalizated museum tours for each user, and to (semi)-automatically generate various personalized routes through the digital Rijksmuseum collection. - Mobile Tour - a PDA-based tool, which uses the results from the Tour Wizard and helps users navigate and discover artworks in the physical Rijksmuseum environment. The online version of the CHIP demonstrator as well as a tutorial with a brief walk-through of the personalization functionality can be found at: http://www.chipproject.org/demo/.
Further, we give a short introduction to the basic functionality of the Webbased parts of the CHIP demosntrator. Please note that the CHIP project collects feedback, on the functionality and usability of the demonstrator, on a regular basis from studies with museum visitors. Thus, the demonstrator changes over time as we are incorporating more functionalities and improvements to the interface. 2
In fig. 1 we illustrates how we employ semantics in building user profiles and using them for generating recommendations to the user, as a way of guiding users through the museum collection. In the Artwork Recommender, the user rates an artwork and several proporties: – artwork Night Watch - 4 stars (i.e. ‘‘I like Night Watch’’); – creator property Rembrandt - 4 stars (i.e. ‘‘I like Rembrandt’’); – theme property Landscape - 4 stars (i.e. ‘‘I like landscape’’); – theme property Self-portrait - 1 star (i.e. ‘‘I hate self-portrait’’). The User Profile stores the user’s ratings for generating recommendations. Now, let’s see how does the artwork and topic recommendation in CHIP work: – Find all Night Watch-related properties, e.g. creator, creation place, creation year, material and themes – Find all Rembrandt -related properties, e.g. style, teacher-of and student-of. – Find all artworks with these properties, e.g. The Jewish Bride and The Stone
Bridge by Rembrandt – Include all artworks with property Landscape, e.g. The Stone Bridge and
Meadow Landscape – Exclude all artworks with property Self-portrait, e.g. Self-portrait of Van Gogh and Self-portrait at an early age
– Result: recommend all artworks with the above positively rated properties.
All recommended artworks are ordered by the number of matching properties, e.g. The Stone Bridge is the first one because it has both Rembrandt and landscape. – Result: recommend all topics with the above positively rated properties, e.g.
Rembrandt, Landscape and Baroque
3
The demo is based on a Sesame [
Fig. 2. CHIP Demonstrator Architecture 3.1
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Collection and Shared Vocabularies
Currently, the demonstrator hosts four thesauri, namely the three Getty
vocabularies9, i.e., the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Union List of Artists
Names (ULAN) and the Thesaurus of Geographical Names (TGN), as well as
the subject classification Iconclass10. We use mappings to IconClass provided
by the STITCH project [
The user can start the exploration by first building a user profile in the Artwork
Recommender component. This is driven by a rating dialog [
Important here is that we recommend not only artworks but also topics (based on the semantic description of each artwork you have already rated). The user can provide her positive or negative feedback to each recommendation (both topics and artworks) by rating the empty set of stars associated with it. This would be recorded then in the user profile in order to increase the level of certainty for related properties and artworks.
If the user is logged with a FOAF profile in the option to view the full user
profile (right top) will show the user’s personal and social network data. In the
full profile we also store the history interaction data about tours that this user
has created and/or followed both on the Web and in the museum with the
PDAbased mobile tour. Current investigations focus on including also social filtering
[
In this interactive way [
The main rationale behind the CHIP demonstrator is based on the assumption that users more and more will spend time preparing their visits to museums and also reflecting on them after the visit. This is driven by the observation that users have an increasing choice of digitalized collections and related information. This leads us to our main goal to allow the users to be their own currators, e.g. selecting the artworks they want to see, influencing the order, the overall theme of the tour and the time to be spent in the museum. In order to realize this we maintain a common user profile for the user on the Web and on the mobile device, and in this way we keep track of users interaction history both in the virtual and in the physical museum.
In the Tour Wizard you have two main screens (tabs): – My Tours: Here the user can see an overview of the current tours and can create a new tour if desired. She can (1) select a tour and then (2) search for a topic, artist or an artwork to include further new items in the currently selected tour. Note that if you go straight to the search option you will not be able to add new items to your tours; you will be able to only search for topics, artworks or artists and browse through the search results. Among the already existing tours we generate for each user a Tour of Recommended Artworks, which contains 20 Rijksmuseum master pieces selected according to user’s current user profile. If further interaction with the demo appears, the user profile will be altered and in this way the tour of recommended artworks will be updated as well. Each tour can be viewed by the user as a list and on a Museum Map (see fig. 5) or on a Historical Timeline (see fig. 6). – Search Results: Here the user can search the Rijksmuseum collection for topics, artists, locations, styles, artworks, etc. and browse the search results. Idealy these results will be altered (filtered with) according to the user profile, so that she will see the artworks related to her search query, which are of relevance and interest to the user. However this option is still in work-inprogress, so it might not work properly yet. Note that if you first do search and then (while browsing the results) you want to add some of them to an existing tour, you will not be able to do so. Unfortunately, the current interface implementation restricts the user to first select a tour and then perform a search for artworks to be included in this tour. We are working on improving this interface limitation, so that you are able to add at any point of time an artwork from the search result (or even from your Artwork Recommender interface) to an existing tour.
Acknowledgements. The CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information Personalization) project is funded by the Dutch Science Foundation funded program CATCH (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) in the Netherlands.