An Approach to Social Recommendation for Context-Aware Mobile Services

Nowadays, several location-based services (LBSs) allow their users to take advantage of information from the Web about points of interest (POIs) such as cultural events or restaurants. To the best of our knowledge, however, none of these provides information taking into account user preferences, or other elements, in addition to location, that contribute to define the context of use. The provided suggestions do not consider, for example, time, day of week, weather, user activity or means of transport. This article describes a social recommender system able to identify user preferences and information needs, thus suggesting personalized recommendations related to POIs in the surroundings of the user's current location. The proposed approach achieves the following goals: (i) to supply, unlike the current LBSs, a methodology for identifying user preferences and needs to be used in the information filtering process; (ii) to exploit the ever-growing amount of information from social networking, user reviews, and local search Web sites; (iii) to establish procedures for defining the context of use to be employed in the recommendation of POIs with low effort. The flexibility of the architecture is such that our approach can be easily extended to any category of POI. Experimental tests carried out on real users enabled us to quantify the benefits of the proposed approach in terms of performance improvement.