Using Common Sense in Providing Personalized Recommendations in the Tourism Domain

Most of mobile tourism recommender systems take into account mainly the users preferences and location when providing personalized suggestions about what to see in the area (either reactively or proactively). MyMap is a mobile recommender system able to provide personalized presentation of objects of interest in the Tourism Domain that exploits two main knowledge sources: the user profile, that is formalized in order to express situational statements and the current context. In our evaluation experiments we discovered that MyMap suggestions missed of common sense knowledge. For instance: if it is raining recommendations about open-air places should be avoided even if the user strongly prefers these kind of places and has not expressed any preference about alternatives. In this paper, we will illustrate how this functionality has been added to the system and we present the first results of the application of common sense knowledge to the recommendation engine of MyMap.