Towards a User-Aware Virtual Museum

The exploration of cultural heritage through well-designed virtual worlds has met an increase in popularity within the last decade. More and more well-known museums around the globe have started to spend funds in order to build systems with which users can virtually navigate through the museums' exhibits. Technological breakthroughs in graphics design and the use of multimedia content have helped these systems become more attractive and easier to use. However, the vast majority of these systems are solely there to represent content in an appealing way, with users just having the submissive role of requesting information. In this paper, we want to make one step further and present a user-aware system for virtual museums. Users in the proposed system are active users who can express their opinions in many different ways, enabling us to extract user preferences on cultural content. We follow a group-based logic in order to capture the underlying differences in user preferences between the groups. We believe that these findings are beneficial for providing a better user experience and, also, for the museum's administrators who can easily assess user interest about the museum by analyzing their evaluations.