Mobile Applications in Smart Tourism: Implementing User Modelling

Currently, there are 6.8 billion smartphone users worldwide while, at the same time, people of all ages actively engage with social networking sites for business, socialising, dating, politics, and simple day-to-day communication. As of April 2022, approximately 4.65 billion individuals were accessing social media, according to Statista [48]. As the popularity of these platforms increases, a massive database is being compiled and there is a growing interest in using data mining and analysis to comprehend user behaviour on social media channels. After conducting research in the field, the question that arose was how the aforementioned devices and the established user behaviour in social media could lead to effective user modelling and personalisation within the context of smart tourism. Thus, we investigate uncharted ways to build a mobile smart tourism recommendation system based on data collected from multiple social media channels. This chapter’s contribution is an approach to implicit data collection and analysis which focuses on how various social media platforms can aid in the data harness required to achieve user modelling in the smart tourism context. In addition, we argue and demonstrate that there is a wealth of information that can be extracted from smartphones and exploited in a smart tourism application scenario, including data derived from sensors and information about the applications a user has installed on his/her smartphone. In order to realise personalisation, semantic web technologies and a multi-criteria decision-making theory are applied once the data harness has been achieved. Our contribution is to determine which raw data may be gathered passively, without user participation, from numerous sources. Simultaneously, we research different approaches for evaluating and merging diverse forms of data to ultimately design viable user models for smart tourism. As a result, we formalised a framework that could be broadly adopted by a range of systems in the context of smart tourism.