By creating links to specific dates we can trigger curiosity, increase retention, and guide visitors around the venue following new appealing narratives in subsequent visits.

Museum visitors’ interests and input can be employed by semantics-based mechanisms that aim to promote reflection on cultural heritage by means of dates (historical events or annual commemorations). By creating links to specific dates we can trigger curiosity, increase retention, and guide visitors around the venue following new appealing narratives in subsequent visits.

The research presents the development and evaluation of a set of diverse narratives about museums exhibits originating from the Archaeological Museum of Tripoli (a small regional museum in Greece). A year-round calendar was crafted so that certain narratives would be more or less relevant on any given day. Expanding on this calendar, personalised recommendations are made by sorting out those relevant narratives according to personal events and interests recorded in the profiles of the target museum visitors.

Taking advantage of a broad range of techniques for semantic modelling, named entity recognition and linking, online data repositories and word vector models, the resulting associations are shown to be deemed accurate (directly or indirectly) by potential visitors. Evaluation results from an experiment involving domain experts and users suggest that calendar-based connections can reveal useful and valuable associations, which can be used to tailor user experiences and engagement with cultural heritage content, discover meaningful connections and deliver incidental associations that contribute to the intended cognitive phenomena.