Helping Tourists to Plan Activities with Shared Urban Social Context

Ubiquitously available map-based services for tourism are becoming a norm, with the spread of smartphones and the integration of pervasive displays in the urban infrastructure. At the same time, interactions with the urban environment through social networks is rife, with actions such as tagging locations and checking-in to these now a part of mainstream mobile social network use. In this paper, we discuss how exploiting mined interactions with the urban environment can help tourists better plan activities, through sharing the collectively generated social context of a smart, connected city, as a background layer to mapped POIs.