Adaptation Step-by-Step: Challenges for Real-time Spatial Personalization

Abstract

In this paper we outline challenges for user modeling and personalization with spatial information. To illustrate those challenges we use a use case with a real-time routing system that implements a mobile museum guide for providing personalized tours tailored to the user position inside the museum and her interests. In this scenario we combine on the one hand (1) interactive discovery of user's interests applied for semantic recommendations of artworks and art-related topics, and on the other hand (2) dynamic step-by-step adaptation of a user's route through a museum based on her current position and changing interests. For this, the existing CHIP mobile museum guide was extended with a routing mechanism based on the SWI-Prolog Space package. 1 Challenges in Dynamic Spatial Adaptation When a visitor moves around in a museum, exploring the collection of artworks based on her interest in these artworks, many spatial aspects can be considered in the process of recommending the visitor what to see. The same holds for a mobile museum guide, where we exploit techniques of dynamic personalization for such recommendations. Adding the spatial aspects allows to improve the dynamic adaptation further. For example, the assessment of the user's constantly evolving interests can be improved by step-by-step spatial information. If we include spatial considerations into the many different elements of dy-namic adaptation, we have many opportunities, but we also have as many re-search challenges. The opportunities we illustrate in this paper are based on our experience with the concrete museum demonstrators from our work in the CHIP project and we have elicited research challenges from that same experience. – Dealing with real-time information: When we deal with real-time in-formation in the process of dynamic adaptation, we can consider the user's position, her context, and her social interaction: • User location: Detecting a user's location inside the physical space is a first challenging step. In a museum this requires a positioning system that considers the boundaries and constraints (i.e. the walls, doors, stairs) of the space. In our case, we have an indoor space, and therefore methods