Understanding and modeling visitor behaviours for enhancing personalized cultural experiences

Nowadays, there is an increasing interest in using adaptive technologies in cultural heritage sites to personalize and enhance the user's visit experience. However, personalizing the cultural experiences is still a challenging task that requires a deep knowledge of those user aspects that influence the visit. In order to facilitate the learning process during the visit, adaptive systems should consider differences between individuals for personalizing access to cultural heritage collections. This article calls into question the role that technologies can play both to enhance a user's visit experience and to attract new audiences through personalized interactions with cultural objects. It addresses a specific understanding of visitors' needs and behaviours by means of empirical data collected through a survey questionnaire. Knowing the main factors underlying visitors' styles it allowed formalization of this knowledge into a user model ontology which collects the main visitors' characteristics in the use of cultural heritage contexts.