# Personalization in Digital Ecomuseums: The Case of Pros-Eleusis
## 9 Discussion and Conclusions  
In this paper, we report our findings after putting a recommendation approach for the ecomuseum of the city of Eleusis, Greece, into practice. The Pros-Eleusis digital ecomuseum application of the city of Eleusis offers geolocalized digital content for many of the city's main landmarks, organized in three different ways: thematic routes (guiding the visitor to follow a specific path and visit POIs in a proposed order), a map view (allowing access to all available POIs), and a personalized map view, which dynamically recommends at each POI the 10 most relevant ones to visit next. Throughout the process of collecting requirements, and designing and evaluating the recommender system and the personalized map view functionality, we were able to reflect on the challenges of the different steps as well as more general issues related to the concept of recommendation in the domain of cultural heritage. Our study could provide an incentive for a more holistic understanding of personalization and recommendation in this field, taking into account experience design aspects as well as the ultimate objectives of cultural heritage visits. The first question when considering to offer a recommendation functionality in an app supporting a museum or a cultural heritage visit, in general, is whether recommendation is really meaningful. A main criterion supporting this decision is the available content. Although the digitization efforts in the past decades have produced thousands, even millions, of digitized artifacts, this content is mainly addressed to experts to support research objectives. Digital content needs to be carefully selected, curated, and edited to be offered to the wider public. This process results in applications that offer digital content designed for a specific visit duration. In most cases, this content is organized in themes or in routes that propose a specific path through the museum, city, or cultural heritage location. The Pros-Eleusis ecomuseum app also follows this approach through the thematic routes functionality. For a recommendation approach to be meaningful, the available digital content should be (1) organized in individual, independent units (POIs); and (2) large enough in number so that different subsets can be selected to be offered to different users. In the case of the Pros-Eleusis ecomuseum app, this is the case. More than 50 POIs are offered to the user in the map view, spanning across different historical periods, locations, and topics, making it very difficult for a visitor to experience them all in one visit. So, in this case, the Eleusis digital ecomuseum content was suitable to consider as a test case for a recommendation approach. Having established that there was enough and diverse content available to justify a recommendation approach, the next challenge was to design the matching the user profile, context, and preferences with the content characteristics. This is also one of the main challenges when attempting to apply recommendations in cultural heritage. The relationship of a visitor and a cultural heritage object is more complex than that of a consumer looking for a specific product. Especially in the case of an ecomuseum, this object is a POI, which is a physical location combined with digital content offered by the app and forming a composite cultural heritage object. Computing the degree of interest of the user on this POI is not straightforward: Will the user like or dislike the POI because of the location itself and its esthetic value or interest to the user, or will the offered digital content, informational content, and narrative style weigh more heavily on the user rating? What are the user characteristics that can be used to predict these content preferences? In the case of a digital ecomuseum, user context elements such as available time, amount of money to pay for entrance, and proximity in terms of location are straightforward constraints to guide recommendation.