Delivering Personalized Content to Open-air Museum Visitors Using Geofencing

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a service that delivers personalized content to open-air museum visitors. The service uses push notifications to deliver this content. Notifications can be delivered to all visitors or personalized - to a group of visitors or to a specific visitor. The service segments museum visitors according to their location and their profile, which is built dynamically over time. For the geospatial segmentation of visitors, geofencing is used - each visitor is assigned to a segment that corresponds to a specific geographic area - part of an open space or exhibit. The service allows localization of visitors by their GPS coordinates or by estimating their distance from Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. The geofences are described as a polygons or circles. Geospatial segmentation is implemented using a NoSQL database MongoDB, which has built-in capabilities for working with geospatial queries. Depending on the profile, each visitor falls into one or several segments: professional researcher, non-professional researcher, inspiration seeker, casual visitor, and visitors with disabilities. For each visitor, personalized content is delivered, depending on the segments to which the visitor is assigned. The necessary experiments have been conducted and analyzed to prove the applicability of the service for real-time delivery of personalized content.