A model for a socially-aware mobile tourist recommendation system

Abstract

People, whether for business or pleasure, often travel or visit locations they are unfamiliar with. To overcome this, a mobile tourist recommendation system can be used. This system is able to generate tourist attraction recommendations for a person, based on a number of criteria such as time and location. One criterion often overlooked though, is a person's social environment. This is an important consideration as touring is often done with more than one person. By not considering the other people within a person's social environment, recommendations will only be limited to the preferences of a single person. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for a mobile tourist guide recommendation system that considers a persons social environment when generating tourist attraction recommendations. This is done by studying other tourist recommendation systems, eliciting key requirements for a socially aware tourist guide system from them, and using these requirements as input for a mobile tourist recommendation system model that can harness a person's social environment when recommending tourist attractions