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

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Corso Svizzera 185, 10149, Torino, Italy

    Francesca Carmagnola, Federica Cena, Luca Console, Omar Cortassa, Cristina Gena, Anna Goy & Ilaria Torre

  2. CSP Innovazione nelle ICT s.c.a.r.l., Torino, Italy

    Andrea Toso & Fabiana Vernero

Authors
  1. Francesca Carmagnola
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  2. Federica Cena
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  3. Luca Console
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  4. Omar Cortassa
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  5. Cristina Gena
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  6. Anna Goy
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  7. Ilaria Torre
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  8. Andrea Toso
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  9. Fabiana Vernero
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Correspondence to Ilaria Torre.

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Carmagnola, F., Cena, F., Console, L. et al. Tag-based user modeling for social multi-device adaptive guides. User Model User-Adap Inter 18, 497–538 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-008-9052-2

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