Serendipitous Encounters along Dynamically Personalized Museum Tours

Today Recommender Systems (RSs) are commonly used with various purposes, especially dealing with e-commerce and information filtering tools. Content-based RSs rely on the concept of similarity between items. It is a common belief that the user is interested in what is similar to what she has already bought/searched/visited. We believe that there are some contexts in which this assumption is wrong: it is the case of acquiring unsearched but still useful items or pieces of information. This is called serendipity. Our purpose is to stimulate users and facilitate these serendipitous encounters to happen. The paper presents a hybrid recommender system that joins a content-based approach and serendipitous heuristics in order to provide also surprising suggestions. The reference scenario concerns with personalized tours in a museum and serendipitous items are introduced by slight diversions on the context-aware tours. Copyright owned by the authors.