With the PIO project Smart Personalisation of the Cultural Offering in Antwerp Testing (SOCRATES), the city of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of an individual cultural user profile. Via such a profile, the city of Antwerp wants to offer personalised recommendations to Antwerp culture lovers (tailor-made culture) at their own request and based on their digital cultural DNA.

This unique digital cultural DNA was the starting point of Socrates. It is an individual cultural profile based on the data the culture services collect about the user (A-card, surfing behaviour on websites, ticket purchases, library loan transactions, newsletter subscriptions, etc.), supplemented with (real-time) contextual information (location, weather conditions, etc.) and data from external sources (social media, etc.). All this, of course, in compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR compliance) and subject to the user's own consent.

Based on the user's digital cultural profile, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make suggestions for e.g. literature and all kinds of cultural activities. The AI algorithms are specifically trained to 'surprise' (serendipity) the user with sufficient diversity in cultural offerings so that the user is not stuck in their own shielded information bubble (or filter bubble).

In the context of the SOCRATES PIO project, 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 of their personal data being used in function of a personalised (cultural) offer.

The technological solution envisaged for Socrates was a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) fuelled by a personalised culture profile and enriched by an amazement algorithm. The intention was to build the DXP in a modular way to allow maximum interfacing with existing and future IT architectures, in particular the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (ACPaaS). ACPaaS offers a 'block box' of reusable (generic) back-end services via engines so that (specific) front-end applications can be made faster, simpler and more powerful. The DXP envisaged with Socrates as an extension of ACPaaS could extend this line to application frontends, or all digital touchpoints with (cultural) users.

As a concrete deliverable of the SOCRATES PIO project, the City of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to arrive at the realisation of a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) of the DXP to validate the intended concepts. With the DXP MVP, the city of Antwerp and Digipolis wanted to deliver recommendations to users, then check whether they acted on the recommendations, and finally collect feedback on their experiences. The DXP-MVP also had to include all the dimensions of '(far) advanced user experience' (including 'wonder') through the deployment of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) technology and through the application of an AI wonder algorithm.