A recommendation system to promote local cultural heritage

Abstract

The value of cultural heritage is widely recognised both at national and international level, because it allows the cultural roots, memories and identity of a territory to be discovered. For this reason it is not limited to historic sites, monuments or churches, but must necessarily include a knowledge of the traditions, legends and religious rites which are part of the culture of a place. Web portals for the promotion of tourism usually offer information limited to only one category of items and this information is not sufficient to gain a deeper knowledge of a place or event. Moreover, it is rare to find on the Net solutions that are able to support teachers choosing the sites to be visited in an educational tour. The paper describes a recommender system for cultural heritage that is able to support both tourists and teachers selecting items (tangible or intangible) to visit, and that is able to offer in-depth material, selected according to the interests of the target users, that can consolidate the knowledge of the places visited. The main features of the system are: the use of a user-centred and collaborative approach to promote knowledge; a set of metadata that allows the resources to be contextualised in the culture of a territory; the use of a recommender method that takes into account the user’s preferences, multi-criteria user feedbacks and the semantic relationships among the items.