An investigation of the suitability of heterogeneous social network data for use in mobile tourist guides

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are used daily by billions of people worldwide to keep them informed about the latest news, to help them interact with other people as well as to provide them with Points of Interest (POIs) to visit. In this paper we examine to what extent the information from SNSs such as likes, tags, check- ins can influence the visitors or locals of a city in choosing venues to visit. Next, we implement an Android application, Social City, for mobile devices, which collects and evaluates the information from Facebook and Foursquare in order to recommend to users venues to visit in the city of Patras, Greece. Finally, we discuss an evaluation of Social City. Our results indicate that the combination of SNS data from multiple social networking sites into a single rating, appears to lead to more efficient recommendations for the users, helping them choose faster and easier and with more confidence about the quality of their choice