An Edge Intelligence Empowered Recommender System Enabling Cultural Heritage Applications

Recommender systems are increasingly playing an important role in our life, enabling users to find “what they need” within large data collections and supporting a variety of applications, from e-commerce to e-tourism. In this paper, we present a Big Data architecture supporting typical cultural heritage applications. On the top of querying, browsing, and analyzing cultural contents coming from distributed and heterogeneous repositories, we propose a novel user-centered recommendation strategy for cultural items suggestion. Despite centralizing the processing operations within the cloud, the vision of edge intelligence has been exploited by having a mobile app (Smart Search Museum) to perform semantic searches and machine-learning-based inference so as to be capable of suggesting museums, together with other items of interest, to users when they are visiting a city, exploiting jointly recommendation techniques and edge artificial intelligence facilities. Experimental results on accuracy and user satisfaction show the goodness of the proposed application.