# Personalization in Digital Ecomuseums: The Case of Pros-Eleusis
## 1 Introduction  
Personalization is defined as \"the ability to provide content and services tailored to individuals based on knowledge about their preferences and behavior\" [1]. Starting from e-commerce applications, in the past decades, it has known widespread usage across many sectors, including health and entertainment. The constantly increasing volume of digitized information and multimedia content, combined with the increasing ubiquity of Internet-enabled mobile devices, has made personalization all the more relevant: users rely more and more heavily on content sharing and consumption through the Web, whereas deciding amongst the alternatives has become increasingly difficult, with context-aware personalization being proposed as an effective solution [2]. Following this trend, cultural heritage (CH) has been an early active domain for personalization research. [PERSON] et al. [3] and [PERSON] [4] identified and reviewed several applications that attempt to put in practice research and innovation in the field of personalization and recommendation. These are designed for indoors, outdoors, as well as virtual visits to cultural heritage sites. For more than four decades, gallery, library, archive, and museum (GLAM) institutions have been engaged in a continuous effort for digitization of their collections [5]. This extensive investment into mass digitization [6] has resulted in millions of digital heritage assets. GLAM institutions are now expected to facilitate the retrieval and reuse of this content under the FAIR principles [7] and proceed to either making it directly available online or using it to support the production of interactive digital experiences, which havebecome widespread in most institutions [8]. As a result, search, exploration, and retrieval have already become challenging for all users, including visitors and experience creators, and the need for personalization as a means to counter data overload has become all the more crucial [9]. Personalization is based on the assumption that the application can understand the users and their needs to provide the most relevant content [10]. Modeling the user, including their interests, prior knowledge, and preferences, as well their current context, and then eliciting their profile based on this model, is one of the main challenges of personalization in CH [3]. As visits to cultural heritage sites are mostly one-time events for the users, and, in some cases, the time dedicated to the visit is limited (in extreme cases, even only a few minutes [11]), a thorough, direct recording of the user profile might not be possible, so the \"cold start\" problem still remains challenging for CH recommendation applications [10]. Consequently, user profiling along with the proper characterization of the digital CH content in terms of themes and topics for recommendation purposes remain amongst the main challenges of personalization in this domain. Personalization research in CH has been focusing on tackling the aforementioned challenges and exploring ways to inform recommendation system designs that will be meaningful in a CH context. GLAM institutions are eager to adopt new technologies; however, these technologies need to be stable and effective enough to be offered as added-value products to the visitors. In this paper, we report our findings after putting into practice a recommendation approach for the ecomuseum of the city of Eleusis, Greece. An ecomuseum is focused on the local identity and natural and cultural history of a place [12], with a strong focus on local community participation, having sustainable development amongst its main objectives. The ecomuseum approach exceeds the concept of outdoors city guides, which highlight the main CH sites or sites, by attempting to create diverse communication pathways between the visitors and the local community. Its objective is to promote deeper understanding of the past and present of a city and create meaningful connections that will promote revisit.