Objective The purpose of this project is to find and recommend all museums which are located in the user’s city and contain the user’s preferred artist and artistic period. The program takes as an input from the user his or her current location, one preferred artist and one preferred artistic period. If the given artist does not belong to the given artistic period, there are two possible types of recommendations: The best recommendation represents one or more museums which contain both the preferred artist and the artists belonging to the preferred artistic period. If no such museums are found in the user’s city, then the second best recommendation generates museums in that city, that either contain the preferred artist’s work or museums that only contain works from the preferred artistic period. Implementation The program is implemented in Java and it queries Dbpedia, using two queries. First, the user is asked to enter the location, artist and period with the help of a scanner. Then, there are two queries which use this input in order to find museums that match the user’s profile and are located in the given city. For the first query, the artist and period are intersected, in order to find museums that contain both. If there are no results for this query, the second one is run, which contains a union, finding museums that either contain the artist or the period. Finally, the resource page of the matched museums is printed on the screen. In parallel, a set of triples is exported into a file, using the Museum Recommender Ontology. For each type of recommendation, the ontology specifies whether the match is generated based on an intersection or a union.

1. Museum Recommender
Mara Dumitru

2. Museum Visits while Traveling
• Choose National
Museum:
– General overview
– Many different painters
and styles
– Overlook favorite artists
or artistic period

3. Purpose
• For art lovers
• Recommend museums in the users’ city based on their
preferred artist and artistic period
• Two types of recommendations:
– The best recommendation finds museums that contain both
the given artist’s work and the works of artists belonging to the
preferred artistic period
– The second best recommendation finds museums that only
contain works of either one of the two preferences

4. Method
• 3 user inputs as strings which are transformed
into URIs
– current city
– favorite artist
– favorite artistic period
• Include the strings in the queries for DBpedia
• Generate URIs of museums, based on input (i.e.
user preferences)

5. Ontology

6. Implementation
• 2 SPARQL queries which select museums:
– Intersect artist and period
– Union to include results from either one
• Implemented in Java (Jena library)
• Prints to file a set of RDF triples, describing
the recommendation and its type, using the
URIs and the ontology

7. Demo

8. Advantages
• Even if the period the artist belongs to does
not match the preferred period…
Favorite artist: Jan van Eyck
(Period: Renaissance)
Favorite period: Impressionism

9. Demo

10. Drawbacks (DBpedia)
• Missing information
• Limits the number of links
between artists, periods and
museums
• Not enough properties, such
as painting theme

11. Semantic Web
• Enables the implementation of recommendation
programs that analyze and select suggestions,
based on a user profile.
• Web interaction becomes more personalized and
more precise, with the increasing number of
databases and querying methods.
• Museum Recommender: simple preferences are
retrieved in DBpedia and connected to each
other, resulting in suggestions which are only
suitable for the user.

12. Semantic Web
• Uses SPARQL to query for museums in
DBpedia.
• Includes recommendation types as OWL
individuals, in order to better define the RDF
triples.

13. Future Implementations
• Museum Recommender as a mobile
application
– especially practical for short travels
– generates museums that contain user’s preferred
artists and periods
– recommends museums in a fast and personalized
manner, anywhere in the world

14. How to Improve
• Find cities near the user’s given
location that represent similar or
better recommendations for
museums.
• Add the theme (landscape,
portrait, historical painting, etc.)
as one of the user’s inputs and
include this preference in the
recommendation.