With the PIP project Smart Personalisation of the Cultural Offer in Antwerp Testing (SOCRATES) the city of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of an individual cultural user profile. Through such a profile, the city of Antwerp wants to offer personalised recommendations to the Antwerp culture enthusiast (tailor-made culture) at his own request and on the basis of his digital cultural DNA.
This unique digital cultural DNA was the starting point of SOCRATES. It's about an individual cultural profile based on the data that the cultural services collect about the user (A-card, surfing behaviour on websites, purchase of tickets, lending transactions at the library, subscriptions to newsletters, etc.), supplemented with (real-time) contextual information (location, weather conditions, etc.) and data from external sources (social media, etc.). All this, of course, in accordance with the privacy regulations (GDPR compliance) and subject to the user's own permission.
Based on the digital cultural profile of the user, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make suggestions for e.g. literature and all kinds of cultural activities. The AI algorithms are specifically trained to 'amaze' the user (serendipity) with sufficient diversity in the cultural offer so that the user does not remain stuck in his own shielded information bubble (or filter bubble).
Within the framework of the PIP project SOCRATES, the city of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to investigate on the one hand how such a personalised cultural user experience could be realised within the framework of privacy regulations (GDPR), and on the other hand strategically investigate the attitude of users towards the idea that their personal data are being used in function of a personalised (cultural) offer.
The envisaged technological solution for SOCRATES was a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) fed by a personal cultural profile and enriched with an amazement algorithm. The aim was to build the DXP in a modular way so that it could be linked to existing and future IT architecture, in particular the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS). ACPaaS offers a 'block box' of reusable (generic) backend services via engines so that (specific) frontend applications can be made faster, easier and more powerful. The DXP intended with SOCRATES as an extension of ACPaaS could extend this line to the application frontends, or all digital touchpoints with the (cultural) users.
As a concrete deliverable of the PIP project SOCRATES, the city of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to realise a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) of the DXP in order to validate the envisaged concepts. With the DXP MVP, the city of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to provide recommendations to users, check whether they responded to the recommendations, and finally receive feedback on their experiences. The DXP MVP should also include the dimension of '(far) advanced user experience' (including 'amazement') through the use of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) technology and through the application of an AI amazement algorithm.
