Personalized Itineraries to Valorise Natural Shopping Centres
Leo Iaquinta1, Vito Micunco2, Giovanni Semeraro1 1 Dep. of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro
2 Software Design S.r.l.
I-CiTies 2015 Palermo – October 29-30, 2015
Outline
• A living lab project
• Scenario
• Recommendation of personalized itineraries
• Conclusions
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Living lab
• A living lab is a research concept • user-centred & co-creation approach • often operating in a territorial context (e.g. city, agglomeration, region) • integrating concurrent research and innovation processes within a public-
private-people partnership • open-innovation ecosystem
• Keywords: co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation of innovative ideas, scenarios, concepts and related technological artefacts in real life use cases
• Use cases involve user communities, not only as observed subjects but also as a source of creation
• This approach allows all involved stakeholders to concurrently consider both the global performance of a product or service and its potential adoption by users
• Adoption whole product life-cycle • Not only during earlier stage of research and development
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The Apulian ICT Living Labs model
• “Open ecosystem” created whereby the user actively takes part in researching and testing innovative ICT solutions
• The Apulia region set up several financial tools for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) • 2007-2013 ERDF Operational Programme, Convergence objective"
Investing in your future", Axis 1, Measure 1.4, Action 1.4.2 "Supporting the growth and development of SMEs specialising in offering digital content and services“
• Aim: developing and enhancing new products and services for the SMEs and families within the entire region
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The Apulian ICT Living Labs model
• Mapping the needs of the end-user • Call for proposal in order to gather and catalogue
themes, requirements and problems highlighted by the users
• Partners Catalogue • Qualification of the end-user and research
laboratories to set-up the partnership catalogue
• Calls for proposal • in order to allocate budget to the SMEs, based on
the proposals presented as well as to the subjects selected in Partners Catalogue
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The Apulian ICT Living Labs topics
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Scenario
• Recent urban centre evolution: thinning in commercial activities • Centralization retail distribution tendency
• spontaneous with autonomous initiatives by individual entrepreneurs in the areas with privileged conditions of accessibility such as town centres or shopping streets
• planned under a single director on extra-urban settlements like shopping centres • “artificial” shopping centres is considered one of the causes of the
thinning
• Goal: preservation and redevelopment of neighborhood commercial activities and small crafts • to revitalize and enhance urban centers leveraging on their
social role in the community identification and recognition
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Scenario
• The commercial offering, along with a structured plan of different services and promotion of cultural heritage, contributes to such goal providing a driving reason to visit and live the centre
• This vision clashes with the end user perception of a fragmented urban offering • lack of a unified direction
• common in extra-urban systems, for instance, guarantees the product mix with a careful selection of operators, general policies for advertising and promotions
• lack of collateral services • such as parking, gas stations, entertaining activities and facilities
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“Centro Urbano Potenziato” (CUP) Project
• Aim: implementing and testing an ICT solution that encourages the planning of marketing strategies to enhance the attractiveness of urban commerce and safeguard the unique economic and cultural aspects
• Distinctive feature: the Living Lab approach • with a continued and significant involvement of user
representatives during the project phases from need identification to result validation
• Area of experimentation: the town centre (originally, “Centro Commerciale Naturale” - CCN) of Bitonto • a municipality with over 55,000 inhabitants in the
metropolitan area of Bari
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Proposed solution
• Use of an application for mobile device allowing end users to obtain information and suggestions about the cultural and commercial offering in the CCN • End users get a unified vision by means of itineraries that
arrange proposed items of the cultural and commercial offering so that such itineraries result tailored on user specific preferences and past assessments
• The suggested itineraries are also adapted to time constraints and visit purpose • Component to provide context-aware recommendations that exploit
the user behavior and feedbacks in order to build and integrate different recommendation models
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Peculiarities
• CCN have both regular and occasional visits • the degree of accumulated knowledge about individual users
may significantly vary
• Different kind of items to suggest with various cardinality • for instance, from a few tens for a single restorative point of
interest to a few thousand for a single supermarket
• items are usable into separate places and according to different timing
• All that determines the need to adopt approaches that can best present the proposals to end users as compromises of different strategies
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Peculiarities
• Business intelligence component to provide economic operators and administrators with tools to understand the overall behavior of users within the CCN and to harmonize the offering consequently
• Promotion of inclusion and a kind of visibility also for many commercial activities, particularly smaller ones, without any Web presence
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Conclusions
• The Living Lab approach to achieve solutions to needs in co-working
• ICT to support preservation and redevelopment of neighborhood commercial activities and small crafts • Leverage on social role of urban centers in the community
identification and recognition • Application for mobile device to provide end users with unified
vision by means of personalizes context-aware itineraries • Business intelligence component to provide economic operators and
administrators with tools to understand the overall user behavior
• The conducted experience can be adopted in other regional contexts, taking into account their specific cultural, commercial and tourist peculiarities in order to exploit them in an integrated approach to tourism and urban space usage
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Thanks for your attention
