A contextual group recommender mechanism for location-based service

With the increasing popularity of social media and ubiquity of mobile devices, location-based services have become a trending topic in both academia and industry. These services, such as Foursquare and Facebook Places, allow users to search and explore around them. The notion of group recommendation, though new, has started to generate interest. Many scenarios in our daily lives involve others around us, be it friends or family members. Daily activities, such as watching a movie or eating at a restaurant are often done as a group. In an effort to combine location-based service features with recommender system concepts, we propose a group contextual mechanism for venue recommendation. Our research aims to discover and recommend places that may be of high relevance to a group of people. Preference, as well as social influence and context-awareness are considered as core components in our mechanism. Our system provides an efficient and convenient platform to groups for venue discovery, and increases commercial publicity for service providers.