# Personalization in Digital Ecomuseums: The Case of Pros-Eleusis
## 2 Study Motivation  
Originating from France in 1971 [12], the ecomuseum concept has been universally acknowledged and used as an innovative approach for the holistic preservation, interpretation, and management of tangible and intangible cultural and natural heritage [13]. An ecomuseum is different from a traditional museum in the sense that it is not housed in a building and does not have a collection of physical objects or artifacts. It allows visitorsto discover the cultural and environmental identity of a defined geographical territory by combining information provision and the engagement of the local community. Visitors have the opportunity to explore the city, accessing indoor and outdoor monuments and points of interest in general and discovering local cultural and natural heritage through its carefully designed content, combined with the possibility of contacting representatives of the local community and experiencing the continuity of culture from past to present. As the ecomuseum approach extends the connection of the visitor with cultural heritage beyond the boundaries of museums and historical sites, it can become an interesting use case for experimentation in the domain of personalization and recommendation. An ecomuseum is a complex system combining past and present through a network of places and people, which are also constantly updated, with new locations added or new content available for these locations. An ecomuseum can offer the amount and diversity of content that would warrant the use of a recommendation approach. In this study, we used the ecomuseum of the city of Eleusis as our case study for the design of a recommendation approach. Eleusis is situated about 18 km northwest from the center of Athens. It has a continuous history dating back to several centuries BCE and a strong involvement in the political and religious life of Ancient Greece as well as a particular industrial recent history. Having become a point of fusion between different cultures and the center of controversy in relation to its difficult environmental issues, Eleusis has a lot to offer to a visitor interested in the distant and recent past. The Eleusis Digital Eomuseum App  
The research project Pros-Eleusis (Personalized Routes in Eleusis--[[https://proseleusis.com/](https://proseleusis.com/)]([https://proseleusis.com/](https://proseleusis.com/)), accessed on 15 December 2022) explored ways to engage visitors with Eleusis, adopting a digital ecomuseum approach to digitally display the natural and cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, of the city in situ. The project focused on the design and implementation of software tools, content, and methodologies for authoring and experiencing personalized or predefined thematic routes in a city where the past and present meet, to simultaneously provide a path toward a sustainable future for the area. The ecomuseum of Eleusis unfolds exists for numerous points of interest within the city, relevant to its older and more recent history, its industrial past, its complex mix of local inhabitants, as well as its current cultural characteristics. The Eleusis digital ecomuseum app aims to address the challenge of engaging visitors with the rich content created for each POI in the city, allowing them to wander in the city in a way more suitable to their preferences and to form a deeper connection with its rich heritage, feeling the desire to revisit. The general concept of the app revolves around offering the visitor rich informational content spanning across time and space as well as different options for activities within the city. The digital content is structured around a set of points of interest (POIs) in the city, which may include open spaces or buildings with different functions: archeological or other heritage sites, museums, town squares, monuments, historical buildings, spaces of ecological or environmental interest, local societies, and even restaurants and cafes. This content is available to the user through the digital ecomuseum app.