Faceted Exploration of Cultural Heritage

The richness of Cultural Heritage (CH) sites exposes tourists to an information overload which makes it difficult to efficiently select the items that they like and can practically visit within a tour. Faceted information exploration has been proposed as a solution to analyze large sets of data. However, most works focus on the inspection of a single type of information, e.g., hotels or music. In contrast, CH items are heterogeneous: they include natural and artificial monuments and different types of artworks which might be visited within a single tour. Moreover, CH sites are often visited in group, thus raising the expectation that all the involved people share information and decisions about what to do. In order to address this issue, we propose a map-based faceted exploration model that makes it possible to create custom, long-lasting maps representing a shared information space for user collaboration, and temporally project these maps on the basis of fine-grained filters which help users focus on items associated to short-term, specific interests. Our model supports the user in the organization and filtering of CH information on the basis of multiple perspectives related to the attributes of items. We propose graphical widgets to support interactive data visualization, faceted exploration, category-based information hiding and transparency of results at the same time. The widgets are based on the sunburst diagram, which compactly displays visualization criteria on data categories by showing facets and facet values in a circular structure.