Virtual cultural tour personalization by means of an adaptive e-learning system: A case study

Visiting a real or virtual museum or an archaeological site can be a hard task, especially in case of large sites provided with many works of art or ancient ruins. For this reason most historical sites provide guided tours, to improve visitors satisfaction and interest. In this work we explore the use of an e-learning environment, called Lecomps5, to provide museums or other cultural sites with the capability of automatically planning personalized tours, according to visitors needs and interests. Lecomps5 allows a domain expert, through a suitable GUI, to build a pool of learning components concerning a given site. Then the system, by means of an embedded planner, generates a personalized tour through the works of art, on the basis of the visitor's artistic interests and needs. We propose a first application of this system to an ancient archaeological site called Lucus Feroniae, showing how an e-learning platform can be successfully used for guiding visitors as well. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.