Graph-based recommendation integrating rating history and domain knowledge: Application to on-site guidance of museum visitors

Visitors to museums and other cultural heritage sites encounter a wealth of exhibits in a variety of subject areas, but can explore only a small number of them. Moreover, there typically exists rich complementary information that can be delivered to the visitor about exhibits of interest, but only a fraction of this information can be consumed during the limited time of the visit. Recommender systems may help visitors to cope with this information overload. Ideally, the recommender system of choice should model user preferences, as well as background knowledge about the museum's environment, considering aspects of physical and thematic relevancy. We propose a personalized graph-based recommender framework, representing rating history and background multi-facet information jointly as a relational graph. A random walk measure is applied to rank available complementary multimedia presentations by their relevancy to a visitor's profile, integrating the various dimensions. We report the results of experiments conducted using authentic data collected at the Hecht museum. An evaluation of multiple graph variants, compared with several popular and state-of-the-art recommendation methods, indicates on advantages of the graph-based approach.