Designing a smart tourism mobile application: User modelling through social networks’ user implicit data

Abstract

In an era facing data and information explosion, there is a demanding need to filter and adapt the content presented to users while interacting with mobile applications. Offering a personalized User Experience (UX) seems to be extremely important in a Smart Tourism-Destination App concept too, in order to enrich tourist experience and also to make a destination more competitive. The main objective of this paper is to present how user modeling could be accomplished via data originating from users’ social networks, where various aspects of their personality are collected and profiled, as well as data collected from their smartphones implicitly, requiring no user interaction. The data collected by the user model are further processed using a multi-criteria decision making theory called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in order to select the touristic destination that seems to be the best for the user interacting with the mobile application.