The Evaluation of a Social Adaptive Web Site for Cultural Events

In this paper, we present an evaluation of a social adaptive web site in the do- main of cultural events, iCITY DSA, which provides information about cultural resources and events that promote the cultural heritage in the city of Turin. Using this evaluation, our objective was to investigate the actual usage of a social adaptive web site, in an effort to discover the real behavior of users, the unforeseen correlations among user actions and the consequent interactive behavior, the accuracy of both system and social recommendations and their impact on the users themselves, and the role of tagging in the user modeling pro- cess. The major contributions of the paper are manifold: insights into user interactions with social adaptive systems; guidelines for future designs; evaluation of the tagging activity and tag meanings in relation to the application domain and thus their impact on the representation of the user model; and a demonstration of how a combination and interplay of evaluation methodologies (e.g., quantitative and qualitative) can enhance our comprehension of evalu-