Location-Aware Recommendation Systems: Where We Are and Where We Recommend to Go

Recommendation systems have been successfully used to provide items of interest to the users (e.g., movies, music, books, news, images). However, traditional recommendation systems do not take into account the location as a relevant factor when providing suggestions. On the other hand, nowadays, there exist an increasing amount of georeferenced data and users are usually interested only in nearby items (e.g., restaurants, museums, cinemas). Hence, the emergence of location-aware recommendation systems have acquired a great attention by the research community in the last decade. In this paper, we provide a survey of location-aware recommendation systems in mobile computing scenarios. Firstly, we describe briefly the fundamentals of recommendation systems. Then, we introduce some of the most relevant existing approaches for location-aware recommendation. Moreover, we present the main applications of this type of systems in several recommendation scenarios, such as music, news, restaurants, etc. Finally, we discuss new avenues and open issues in the area.