A mobile tourism recommender system

Abstract

Mobile tourist guides have been in the spotlight during the past decade resulting in many prototypes, either full-fledged standalone mobile applications or web-based applications. Particular emphasis has been given to personalisation of services, typically based on travel recommender systems used to assist tourists in choosing places to visit; these systems address an important aspect of personalization and hence reduce the information burden for the user. However, existing systems fail to exploit information, behaviors, ideas, evaluations, assessments, ratings, etc, by other tourists with similar interests, which provide ground for the cooperative production of tourist content and travel recommendations. In this paper we extend this notion of travel recommender systems utilizing collaborative filtering techniques for deriving improved recommendations. We also propose the use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) installations around tourist sites for providing mobile users convenient and inexpensive means for uploading tourist information and ratings about Points of Interest (POI) via their mobile devices. User ratings uploaded through WSN infrastructures are weighted higher to differentiate between users that rate POIs using the mobile tourist guide application in direct proximity of the POI and others using the Internet away from the POI.