Tribhuvan University

Institute of Science and Technology

A Final Year Project proposal

on

Web Museum with Recommendation System

Submitted to
Department of Computer Science and Information Technology
Ambition College
Baneshwor, Kathmandu, Nepal

In partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Information Technology

Submitted by
Bimala Bhandari (Roll no.: 1228/068)
Puran Adhikari (Roll no.: 1235/068)
Shankar Khatri (Roll no.: 1221/068)
April 2015

Under the supervision of

Mr. Chiranjibi Sitaula
 Table of Contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Problem definition 3
3. Objectives 3
4. Proposed Work 4
5. Research methodology 4
5.1 Literature Review 5
5.2 Data Collection 6
5.3 Testing and Verification 6
5.4 Expected Result 6
6. Working Schedule 7

References 7
1. Introduction
Web Museum is a virtual museum in which people can view, purchase and add the ancient and
rare monuments through web. It is a digital that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in
order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization,
interactivity and richness of content.

Visitor can view the items that are listed in website with their details. They can view the image,
read the description, rate the item and can purchase if it is made available to sell by the uploader.
On the other hand, a visitor after registering with his own user account can also upload his own
items to the museum.

The Web Museum extensively use the concept of recommendation to the users. If a user is
registered and visits the museum then the items are recommended to that user that makes them
interest. The recommendation system uses some algorithms to suggest items to the users.

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web and the emerging popularity of E-Commerce has
caused the collection of data to outpace the analysis necessary to extract useful information [1].
Recommendation systems were developed to help close the gap between information collection
and analysis by filtering all of the available information to present what is most valuable to the
user.

There are three main branches of recommendation systems: [2]

a. Content Based Filtering:

Content based filtering (CBF) [3] approaches create relationships between items by analyzing
inherent characteristics of the items. Content-based filtering methods are based on a description
of the item and a profile of the user’s preference. In a content-based recommendation system,
keywords are used to describe the items; beside, a user profile is built to indicate the type of item
this user likes. In other words, these algorithms try to recommend items that are similar to those
that a user liked in the past (or is examining in the present). In particular, various candidate items
are compared with items previously rated by the user and the best-matching items are
recommended.

1
b. Collaborative Filtering:
Collaborative filtering (CF) [4] systems do not analyze an items properties, but instead take
advantage of information about users’ habits to recommend potentially interesting items. The
analysis of user behavior patterns, allows collaborative filtering systems to consider
characteristics that would be very difficult for content based systems to determine such as the
reputation of the author, conference, or journal. CF approaches are also well suited to handle
semantic heterogeneity, when different research fields use the same word to mean different
things.

Recommendation
Customer System

Request Rating Rating

WWW HTML
Server Generator
Response Recommends Recommends

Correlation
Database
Rating
Figure 1: Collaborative Recommendation System Database

c. Hybrid Recommendation System:

Recent research has demonstrated that a hybrid approach [2], combining collaborative
filtering and content-based filtering could be more effective in some cases. Hybrid approaches
can be implemented in several ways: by making content-based and collaborative-based
predictions separately and then combining them; by adding content-based capabilities to a
collaborative-based approach (and vice versa); or by unifying the approaches into one model [6].

2
2. Problem Definition
People may have interest of viewing and getting knowledge about the historical, ancient and rare
things available throughout the world. For doing this, people have to go to the places where these
kinds of things are available, generally a physical museum. But, going to the museums of
different parts of the world is not easy. People may not have enough time and money for this.

We extensively use recommendation system to recommend different items available in the

museum to the registered users. Recommendation system recommends the items that may be of
users’ interest. This avoids users to search the items manually and hence there will be less traffic
on the system.

Problem Statement: Suppose I = {i | “i” is an item} is the set of items presented in a website,
termed the item-set of the web-site, and x is a user interactively navigating the Web-site. The
recommendation problem is defined to find a ranked list of the items I x, termed wish-list, in
which items in Ix are ranked based on x interests.

To provide a wish-list for a user, generally a CF-based recommendation system goes through 2
steps/phases:

a. User Classification: During this phase, data about user interests are acquired and
employed to classify the user.
b. Ranking the Items: In this phase, the predicted user interests are applied to rank and
order the items in the item-set to provide the final wish-list for the user.

3. Objectives
Virtual museum facilitates people to view and get information about old monuments online.
People don’t have to visit the museum physically and hence their time and money is saved.
People can also purchase items if they want and is made available to sell by the uploader. They
can pay online by the help of online payment partners like PayPal.

The main objectives of Web Museum are as follows:

3
 a. People can view, get knowledge, and even purchase the items online that are ancient,
rare, popular and valuable to them.
b. The monuments, personal creations such as paintings and photos can also be viewed,
analyzed and buy as per user’s interest.
c. User can also upload items of their own. They have their personal account by which they
can manage their items in the museum.

The main objectives of using recommendation system in Web Museum are as follows:

a. The items of their interest are recommended to the users which helps them to be familiar
with the website and they feel comfortable to visit the website regularly.
b. Users don’t have to search the items manually in the system.
c. Recommendation system is an emerging technology and different websites like Amazon,
YouTube, and Netflix are using this.

4. Proposed Work
Though it is a virtualization of museum the central focus goes to the recommendation system.
The recommendation system takes the history of users past purchases, ratings and visits. A user
can upload items from his personal account. He can buy the items from museum if it is made
available to sell by the uploader. The user can also rate the items that are available in museum.
The items have their specific categories. The display of the items will be on the basis of their
assigned categories. The recommendation system recommends items to the user. The Entity
Relationship Diagram of the overall project is shown in Figure 2.

5. Research Methodology
The methods used in the main module of this research work are described in this chapter.
Sections are organized as follows:

4
 Figure 2: Entity Relationship Diagram

5.1 Literature Review:

There are many efforts underway to make web museum. Also, there are many researches done in
the field of recommendation system. The various techniques have been proposed to make a
recommendation system are Content Based Filtering, Collaborative Filtering and Hybrid
Filtering. Using these techniques different software has been implemented the recommendation
system. The basic concept of these techniques is the classification of items on the basis of user’s
visits and purchase. This automatic process increases the performance of the system and makes it
faster.
In 1994, Nicolas Pioch of France has adopted the concept of WebMuseum by making a website
ibiblio.org.
One of the key events that energized research in recommender systems was the Netfix Prize.
From 2006 to 2009, Netflix sponsored a competition, offering a grand prize of $1,000,000 to the

5
team that could take an offered dataset of over 100 million movie ratings and return
recommendations that were 10% more accurate than those offered by the company's existing
recommender system. This competition energized the search for new and more accurate
algorithms. On 21 September 2009, the grand prize of US$1,000,000 was given to the BellKor's
Pragmatic Chaos team using tiebreaking rules.

5.2 Data collection:

This research work will use monuments and items from the users upload. The users can upload
items from their personal account. Other people view those items from their end. The museum
consists of the items in different categories such as art, paintings, photographs, historical things,
and many more. At first, some of the items are inserted into the database by the developer end.
The data are collected by visiting different museums of Nepal (especially of Kathmandu valley)
whenever possible. Moreover, the references over the internet is used to insert those data into the
database of Web Museum.

5.3 Testing and Verification:

After implementation of the algorithms and selection of dataset, the module will be tested using
the unit test, integration test, functional testing, usability test, black box and white box test.

5.4 Expected Result

The attainable accuracy and efficiency defined by the classification models could be achieved as
a final result.

6
6. Working Schedule

Weeks
Activities 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Study and Analysis

Data collection

Implementation

Testing

Documentation

Review

Presentation *

References
1. Nitin Agarwal, Ehtesham Haque, Huan Liu, Lance Parsons: “Research Paper
Recommendation Systems: A Subspace Clustering Approach*”, Arizona State University,
Tempe AZ 85281, USA, 2005.
2. Stephan Spiegel: “A Hybrid Approach to Recommendation Systems based on Matrix
Factorization”, at Department for Agent Technologies and Telecommunications, Technical
University Berlin.
3. Cyrus Shahabi, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani, Yi-Shin Chen, and Dennis McLeod: “Yoda:
An Accurate and Scalable Web-based Recommendation System”, Department of Computer
Science, Integrated Media Systems Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
4. Michael D. Ekstrand, John T. Riedl and Joseph A. Konstan: “Collaborative Filtering
Recommendation Systems”, Foundations and Trends® in Human - Computer Interaction Vol.
4, No. 2 (2010) 81 - 173.

7
5. Asela Gunawardana, Christopher Meek: “A Unified Approach to Building Hybrid
Recommendation Systems”, Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052.
6. Robin Burke: “Hybrid Recommendation Systems: Survey and Experiments†”, California
State University, Fullerton Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences.
7. Shuo Chang, F. Maxwell Harper, Loren Terveen: “Using Groups of Items for Preference
Elicitation in Recommendation Systems”, GroupLens Research University of Minnesota,
March 14-18, 2015.
8. Prem Melville, Vikas Sindhwani: “Recommendation Systems”, IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598.
9. Hao Ma, Dengyong Zhou, Chao Liu, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King: “Recommendation
Systems with Social Regularization”.
10.J. Ben Schafer, Joseph Konstan, John Riedl: “Recommendation Systems in E-Commerce”,
GroupLens Research Project Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University
of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455 1-612-625-4002.
11.Joeran Beel, Stefan, Marcel Genzmehr, Bela Gipp, Corinna, Andreas: “Research Paper
Recommendation System Evaluation: A Quantitative Literature Survey”.
12.Guy Shani, David Heckerman, Ronen I. Brafman: “An MDP-Based Recommendation
System”, 2005.