The objective of the SMARTMUSEUM project is the development of an IT mobile platform for users enabling personalised access to existing digital content. The platform understands the users’ preferences and identifies and recommends points of interests in outdoor environments and most relevant artefacts during museum visits. The content is therefore customised on the users’ specific needs and it is accessible through a personal smartphone. At the same time, SMARTMUSEUM allows a simple reuse of existing digital content with detailed users’ feedback information.

Description of target users and groups

Smartmuseum targets all kinds of museum visitors and in general tourists in outdoor cultural heritage areas; the default interface is in English.

Technology solution

The developed personalized recommendation system for cultural heritage content is based on widely accepted Dublin Core metadata representation and Getty anthologies.

Technology choice: Mainly (or only) open standards

Main results, benefits and impacts

A pilot cultural heritage recommendation system for tourists was set up in two museums in Florence and Valletta, giving personalised recommendations for museum visitors and to tourist in external environments. The system supports RFID and GPS based positioning, text-to-speech synthesis and user preference learning; the system has obtained a very positive feedback from the users concerning its functionality and usability.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

• It is necessary to reply on selected partners, as is hard to invite remote partners to do things outside their traditional topics, even if they initially agreed.
• Early integration and deployment of the simplified system proved to be essential to end up with stable working demonstrator. 
• Technological infrastructure has to be customisable even for prototypes; otherwise it would not meet the users’ needs.

Scope: International