PILGRIM: A Location Broker and Mobility-Aware Recommendation System

Brunato, Mauro and Battiti, Roberto (2002) PILGRIM: A Location Broker and Mobility-Aware Recommendation System. Technical Report DIT-02-092, Ingegneria e Scienza dell'Informazione, University of Trento.

Abstract

Mobile computing adds a new, mostly unexplored dimension to data mining: the user's position is now a relevant information, and recommendation systems, i.e. services that select and rank a small number of links that are probably of interest to the user, have the opportunity to take location into account. The use of location discovery systems, that automatically detect the device location, relieve the user from the burden of explicitly inserting that information when formulating a query.

In this paper, a mobility-aware recommendation system that uses the location of the user to filter recommended links is proposed. To avoid the potential problems and costs caused by systems where the bindings between locations and resources are inserted by hand, a new middleware layer, the "location broker", collects a historic database where user locations and links explored in the past are mined to develop models relating resources to their spatial usage pattern. The models are used to calculate a preference metric when the current user is asking for resources of interest.

Mobility scenarios are described and analyzed in terms of possible user requirements and problems, and the features of the PILGRIM mobile recommendation system are outlined together with a preliminary experimental evaluation of different metrics.