Building a User Model for Museum Exploration and Information-Providing Adaptive System

Hyperaudio is a system able to organize the presentation of a museum contents taking into account the visitor's needs and the layout of the physical space. The system is able to integrate a physical space with a virtual space in order to build a more general notion of augmented space: not only can the system provide the visitor with information tailored on his own interests and interaction history, but it can also support the visitor in his own exploration of the physical space, helping him to find what he is looking for and suggesting new interesting physical locations. In this paper we describe the developing of the User Model components for this type of system: we found helpful to separate distinct functionalities about user modelling. These components are useful in planning the content presentations to the visitors. A presentation could take into account what the user already knows (to avoid boring repetitions, to make new things easier to understand by making comparisons, etc...), what the user is interested to (to propose new concepts and/or location to go etc...) and the interaction way the user seems to prefer. Some observations from psychologists and emerging from questionnaires, workshops and observations about users help identifying parameters and features that influence how the User Model evolve and could be organized