PATHS at PATCH 2011

Personalising Access to Cultural

Heritage Collections using

Pathways

Paula Goodale1, Paul Clough1, Nigel Ford1 & Mark Stevenson2

The Information School1, University of Sheffield

Department of Computer Science2, University of Sheffield

http://www.paths-project.eu/eng

Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011




Overview

• Information access in cultural heritage

• The PATHS project received funding from

the European Community

• Pathways for navigation and personalised

access

• Summary


Information access in Cultural Heritage

• Significant amounts of CH material available online

– Web portals, digital libraries, Wikipedia …

– aggregated portals (e.g. Europeana)

• Users may find it difficult to navigate and interpret

wealth of information

– keyword-based access provides limited success

– many users are not domain or subject experts

– limited support for knowledge exploration and discovery

• Cultural institutions looking at new ways of providing

rich user experiences

– user participation (e.g. web2.0), personalisation, …


The project vision

• Provide functionality to support user‟s knowledge discovery and

exploration

• The use of pathways/trails to help users navigate and explore the

information space

• The use of personalisation (e.g. recommender systems) to adapt

views/paths to specific users or groups of users

• Show links to other items within and external to an item to help

users contextualise and interpret the item


Task type Example

Specific fact-finding How many works by Henry Bishop are in the collection?

Extended fact-finding Which of the following artists lived during the same time

period?

Open-ended browsing Find as many artists as you can who lived between 1800 and

1900.

Exploration Find an abstract painting that you like in the collection

Differing types of search task


Personalised Access To cultural Heritage

Spaces (PATHS)

• STREP funded under the Community's Seventh

Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under

grant agreement n 270082

• 36 months

– 1st January 2011 to 31st December 2013

• Budget – 3,199,299 euros in total

– 2,300,000 euros EU grant

• 6 partners in 5 countries

• 334 person months

• 8 work packages

• 22 deliverables


The consortium

• PATHS is a partnership project which involves the

work of many individuals:

• Two universities

– Sheffield University

– Universidad del Pais Vasco

• Two technology enterprises

– i-sieve technologies Ltd

– Asplan Viak Internet Ltd

• Two cultural heritage enterprises

– MDR Partners

– Alinari 24 Ore Spa

• Additional content provider

– Europeana


3/2/2011 © The University of Sheffield

Europeana


Project objectives

• Analysis of users‟ requirements for discovering knowledge in based

on Cultural Heritage collections and construction of pathways/trails

• Automated organisation and enrichment of Cultural Heritage content

for use within a navigation system

• Implementation of a system for navigating Cultural Heritage

resources that is applied to data provided by Europeana and Alinari

• Techniques for providing personalised access to Cultural Heritage

content (e.g. recommender systems)

• Porting the navigation system for use on mobile devices and

Facebook

• Evaluation with user groups and in field trials


Research areas

• Information Access

– user-driven navigation through collections of information

– knowledge of users‟ requirements for access to cultural heritage

collections

– modeling of user preferences and context

• Educational Informatics

– adapting to individual learners in relation to being directed and

being allowed the freedom to explore autonomously

• Content Interpretation and Enrichment

– representation and sharing of information about items in Digital

Libraries

– identifying background information related to the items in cultural

heritage collections (e.g. links to Wikipedia pages)


Pathways for navigation and personalisation

• Navigation through the information is based around the

metaphor of “paths”

– flexible model of navigation and exploration onto which various

levels of personalisation can be added

• Paths provide the following information

– a history of where the user has been

– suggestions of where the user might go next

– a (thematic) narrative through a set of items

• Items in a path can be ordered

– chronologically

– thematically

– ...


Which can be

adapted and

mapped to

individual

learning styles

• Trails (Memex, 1945)– Associative trails explicitly created by users forming links

between stored materials to help others navigate

• Destinations (search engines and web analytics)– Origin/landing page (from query), intermediate pages and

destination page

• Search strategies (information seeking)– Users moving between information sources, perhaps due to

changes in their information needs

• Guided tours (hypertext)– authors create sequence of pages useful to others (manual)

– automatically generated trails to assist with web navigation

– used in educational informatics and cultural heritage

Paths and trails have been studied in many fields


Example paths/trails in cultural heritage

• The Walden‟s Paths project

– http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/

– allow educators to arrange web pages into a series of sequential

paths on specific topics

– educators can add comments at each node

– highly prescriptive and users cannot deviate from paths

• Thematic trails – Louvre

– http://www.louvre.fr/llv/activite/liste_parcours.jsp?bmLocale=en

– selection of works that typify a period, artistic movement or

theme (routes provide narrative when viewing physical objects)

– trails can be viewed online or printed prior to visit to museum

– prescriptive with limited interactivity and personalisation


http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/

http://www.louvre.fr/llv/activite/liste_parcours.jsp?bmLocale=en

Pathways

• A path is a „route‟ through an information space

– defined as collections of cultural heritage resources

– consists of nodes and links to connect nodes (graph)

• Nodes can be connected in different ways

– pre-computed based on similarity between items

– computed on-the-fly (automated) and personalised

– defined by system/designers (guided paths)

– defined by users (individual or collectively)

• Exist as information objects in their own right

– can be indexed, organised and shared with others, and will be

potential learning objects that can be offered to users alongside

the cultural heritage content


Possible paths

Start DestinationKnowledge discovery

e.g. WW II

Subject knowledge

(e.g. taxonomy)


Independent paths

• Users can construct their own “independent paths”

– can be saved for future reference, edited or shared with other

users

– e.g. “Sheffield steel industry”, “my favourite works by Rembrandt”

or “items seen during my trip to London on 6th Feb 2010”

• More than a simple list of items in a collection that the

user has visited (i.e. bookmarks)

– also contain information about the links between the items

(relationships)

– descriptive text (e.g. annotations, tags)

– details of others items connected to them

– connections to information both within and outside the collection

that provides context


• Users can also follow pre-defined “guided paths”– created by domain experts, such as scholars or teachers

• Provide an easily accessible entry point to the collection– can be followed in their entirety

– or left at any point to create an “independent path”

• Guided paths can be based around any theme– artist and media (“paintings by Picasso”)

– historic periods (“the Cold War”)

– places (“Venice”)

– famous people (“Muhammed Ali”)

– emotions (“happiness”)

– events (“the World Cup”)

– or any other topic (e.g. “Europe”, “food”)

Guided paths


• Groups of users can work collectively to create “collaborative paths”– adding new routes of discovery and annotations that

can build upon the contributions made by others

• Could be used to encourage social interaction

Collaborative paths


• Different users will have differing needs from pathways– system will make user-specific recommendations about items of

potential interest as individuals navigate through the collection

• Build up knowledge and understanding of users– cognitive styles

– expertise/subject knowledge

– age

– gender

– language abilities

– system interactions (implicit)

• User will be offered links to information both within and outside the collection – provide contextual and background information, individually

tailored to each user and their context

Adapting to individuals and groups

explicit


User model

Learning and knowledge discovery

• A particular area of focus in PATHS will be on learning

and knowledge discovery

– Help people as they use cultural heritage resources to learn and

discover new knowledge

• People learn and solve problems differently

– some people require a lot of guiding; others are self-directed

– some people welcome irrelevant material; others are intolerant

– some people creatively explore and come up with new ideas;

others want to simply answer a set problem

• Users may perform information seeking

– must navigate through information spaces

– different people may require different levels of assistance


Autonomous

Dependent

Local

(analytic)Global

Key cognitive dimensions (Pask and Witkin)

Adopting a navigation path that

matches one‟s predominant style

can influence the effectiveness of

the resultant learning.

Local (analytic) Global

Learning/problem-solving goals

Convergent goals.

“Find an answer”.

Learn pre-defined content.

Divergent goals.

Creatively explore.

Come up with new ideas.

Process goals

Concerned with procedures

and vertical deep detail

(procedure building).

Concerned with conceptual

overview and horizontal broad inter-

relationships (description building).

Navigation styles

Serialist navigation style

Narrow focus.

One thing at a time.

Short logical links between

nodes.

Intolerance of strictly

irrelevant material.

Finish with one topic before

going on to the next.

Holist navigation style

Broad global focus.

Many things on the go at the same

time.

Rich links between nodes.

Welcoming of enrichment (but

strictly irrelevant) material.

Layered approach returning to nodes

at different level of detail.

Positive learning outcomes

Good grasp of detailed

evidence.

Deep understanding of

individual topics.

In-depth understanding of the

parts.

Well developed conceptual

overview.

Broad inter-relationship of ideas.

Good grasp of the “big picture”.

Characteristic learning pathologies

Poor appreciation of topic

inter-relationships.

Failing to see the “big

picture”.

Poor grasp of detail.

Over-generalisation.

• Pathways offer powerful metaphor for navigation onto which personalisation can be added– map onto user‟s existing models of user information behaviour

• Can be used to support various styles of cognitive information processing– surface as different routes taken through information space

• Offering users suggested routes will – help them locate information in large collections

– help encourage information exploration and discovery

– help them fulfil broader activities (e.g. constructing knowledge)

• Ultimately paths could help enhance user‟s information access experience of digital library resources– but we need to understand users and their needs

Summary


Contact

[email protected]

Thank you for listening

Any questions?


PATHS at PATCH 2011

Technology

Transcript of PATHS at PATCH 2011