In an ideal world, when we visit a museum, we would have the personal services of an experienced guide, who could tell us all we want to know. This paper discusses how to provide similar support electronically, to all museum visitors. Full details of the project are available at the Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage (PEACH) project Web site (http://peach.itc.it).

In essence, each visitor carries a location-aware personal digital assistant (PDA) that acts as a guide. The user can provide feedback during the tour, by pressing a “WOW” button or an “ENOUGH” button. The length of time spent at each point in the museum is used, in conjunction with a stored knowledge base, to provide implicit indications of interest in particular exhibits.

At the end of the visit, the user is provided with a report that indicates his or her areas of interest, and makes suggestions on following up these interests in other places.

As with all attempts at clustering specific data, in order to relate it to more generalized information, the performance will be determined by the richness of the knowledge base, as created by the museum staff. How the program determines that the visitor sat down at a particular point in the museum because his or her feet were aching, rather than because of an interest in the adjoining exhibit, is not discussed.