Adding Personalization and Social Features to a Context-Aware Application for Mobile Tourism

Abstract

The proliferation of location-aware mobile devices, together with the advent of Web 2.0 services, promotes the creation of hybrid applications which can provide innovative personalized context-aware services. Personalized recommendation services aim at suggesting products and services to meet users’ preferences and needs, while location-based services focus on providing information based on users’ current positions. Due to the fast growing of users’ needs in the mobile tourism domain, the provision of personalized location-based recommendation services becomes a critical research and practical issue. In this proposal, the authors present GiveMeAPlan, a mobile service which supplies tourist recommendations taking into account both the user preferences (personalization) and context information (time, location, weather, etc.) enriched with social features and targeted advertisements to support its business model. An application prototype is also being implemented to illustrate and test the system feasibility and effectiveness.