Serendipitous Encounters along Dynamically Personalized Museum Tours.

Today Recommender Systems (RSs) are commonly used with various purposes, especially dealing with e-commerce and information filtering tools. Content-based RSs rely on the concept of similarity between items. It is a common belief that the user is interested in what is similar to what she has already bought/searched/visited. We believe that there are some contexts in which this assumption is wrong: it is the case of acquiring unsearched but still useful items or pieces of information. This is called serendipity. Our purpose is to stimulate users and facilitate these serendipitous encounters to happen. The paper presents a hybrid recommender system that joins a content-based approach and serendipitous heuristics in order to provide also surprising suggestions. The reference scenario concerns with personalized tours in a museum and serendipitous items are introduced by slight diversions on the context-aware tours. 1. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION RSs allow a customized information access for targeted domains. They provide the users with personalized advices based on their needs, preferences and usage patterns. Sometimes RSs can only recommend items that score highly against the user’s profile and, consequently, the user is limited to obtain advices only about items too similar to those she already knows. This drawback is referred as over-specialization and it prevents surprising finding from taking place. Indeed, the RSs are required to provide novel and even serendipitous ∗The full version will appear in A. Lazinica (editor), E-Commerce, ISBN 978-953-7619-X-X, electronic version freely available at http://intechweb.org. Appears in the Proceedings of the 1st Italian Information Retrieval Workshop (IIR’10), January 27–28, 2010, Padova, Italy....