Title: Cultural heritage recommendations and user navigation in large scale virtual environments

Authors: Vasileios Komianos; Eleni Kavvadia; Konstantinos Oikonomou

Addresses: Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece ' Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece ' Department of Informatics, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece

Abstract: In this article, an advanced large scale virtual environment aiming at cultural heritage promotion is presented. The advancements proposed are a set of methods and systems integrated into the virtual environment in order to turn it into an interactive cultural guide. The platform is designed to provide recommendations, navigation assistance and access to information resources. This work deals with important issues originating from the large scale factor which affects the process of making recommendations and users' navigation. Moreover, the plethora of entities of interest hosted in the presented virtual environment set the need of a flexible and descriptive information schema to keep and serve its content. The structure of the whole system is designed to enable interoperability and provides interfaces for third-party applications.

Keywords: virtual environments; cultural heritage; navigation assistance; recommendation systems; points of interest; information schema; focused guiding; way-finding augmentations; recommender systems; interactive cultural guide; digital culture; interoperability; case study; architectural heritage; Ionian Islands.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCISTUDIES.2015.071184

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies, 2015 Vol.4 No.2, pp.151 - 172

Received: 08 Oct 2014
Accepted: 06 Feb 2015

Published online: 16 Aug 2015 *

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