Towards the development of a smart tourism application based on smart POI and recommendation algorithms: Ceutí as a study case

Abstract

Nowadays, major industry, government, and citizen initiatives are boosting the development of smart applications and services that improve the quality of life of people in domains such as mobility, security, health, and tourism, using both emerging and existing technologies. In particular, a smart tourist destination aims to improve both the citizen’s quality of life and the tourist experience making use of innovation and technology. In this way, the main idea of this work is to develop a smart application focused on improving the tourist experience. The application will be based on a new concept called Smart Point of Interaction (Smart POI), the user experience research in this area, as well as a Smart POI recommendation algorithm capable of considering both user preferences and geographical influence when calculating new suggestions for users. For the experimental phase, two scenarios are considered: a simulated story and a real-world environment. In the real-world scenario, the town of Ceutí will be the first scope while for the simulated scenario, a database will be generated through surveys. As a first result, the points of interest, the target audience, and the features that will constitute the database representative of the user profile have been defined according to the real-world scenario in Ceutí. Moreover, the incorporation of an explicit feedback mechanism for the Smart POIs has been proposed as an initial approach to address user preferences.