Using gamification to discover cultural heritage locations from geo-tagged photos

• Published in: Personal and ubiquitous computing Vol. 21; no. 2; pp. 235 - 252
• Main Authors: Bujari, Armir, Ciman, Matteo, Gaggi, Ombretta, Palazzi, Claudio E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Springer London 01.04.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Attraction; Computer Science; Cultural heritage; Cultural resources; Digital photography; Faults; Games; Geography; Mobile Computing; Original Article; Personal Computing; Pictures; Recommender systems; Social networks; Towns; Ubiquitous computing; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Cultural heritage; Knowledge discovery; Gamification; Geolocalization
• ISSN: 1617-4909; 1617-4917
• DOI: 10.1007/s00779-016-0989-6

Many enchanting cultural heritage locations are hidden from tourists, especially when considering countries full of historic attractions. Tourists tend to consider only mainstream monuments and towns, neglecting wonderful little jewels along their travel itinerary. However, this is generally not their fault, as travelers cannot be aware of all the surrounding beauties when visiting a new region. To this aim, we discuss and analyze here PhotoTrip , an interactive tool able to autonomously recommend charming, even if not mainstream, cultural heritage locations along travel itineraries. PhotoTrip is able to identify these points of interest by gathering pictures and related information from Flickr and Wikipedia and then provide the user with suggestions and recommendations. An important technical challenge for this kind of services is the ability to provide only the most relevant pictures among the many available for any considered itinerary. To this aim, we have exploited social networks, crowdsourcing and gamification to involve users in the process of improving the response quality of our system.