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10 SIGNALS: A personalized city tours prototype

Conference Paper · August 2017

DOI: 10.1109/ColComCon.2017.8088207

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 10 SIGNALS: A Personalized City Tours Prototype
Laura Martinez Garcia, MsC
Vicerectoria de Investigaciones
Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico Comfenalco,
Cartagena, Colombia
lmartinezg@tecnologicocomfenalco.edu.co
Valentina Codutti, Student
Vicerectoria de Investigaciones
Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico Comfenalco,
Cartagena, Colombia
valentinacoduttitheran@gmail.co
Abstract— A recommender system is presented using a
stereotyping model to create tourist classes in order to match up
users with other user profiles according to the gender, age and
tourism preferences. The prototype permits suggest points of
interest and create a route planning in a city destination when
users are classified in a category. This approach is implemented
as a tourist tool called 10signals which offers personalized city
tours in Cartagena, Colombia.
Keywords—Recommender System, KNN, Point Of Interest,
Tourist, Stereotyping.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recommender systems are programs which attempt to
recommend items (products or services) to users (individuals
or businesses) by predicting a user's interest in an item based
on related information and interactions [1]. In the context of
tourist, recommender system is useful to give information
about touristic places according to the user preferences.
Recommender systems in tourism can recommend points
of interest (POIs) and POIs route planning. Several systems
are focused on recommend points of interest, which through a
list of recommendations, evaluated POIs and then apply a
recommender process by tour groups [2]. On the other hand,
based route planning systems offer an automatic sequence of
points of interest to visit by tourists considering your user
profile and historical data.
The user information is stored in user profile, usually
gathered in three ways: it can be explicitly captured by asking
the user directly for; the system can try to associate the user
with a predefined social group that has well known
preferences (stereotyping) or new information about the user
can be obtained in an implicit way by observing his/her
interaction with the system [3]. This proposal is based on
stereotyping technique to create profiles tourist in order to
general preferences categories according to the gender and age
978-1-5386-1060-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Jhonatan Montes Serna, Student
Vicerectoria de Investigaciones
Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico Comfenalco,
Cartagena, Colombia
montesj@tecnocomfenalco.edu.co
of the person. The recommender system (10 SIGNALS) uses a
route planning to assist tourists to plan a trip in a city
destination according to his/her preferences. This method
permits suggest points of interest and create a route planning
when user is classified in a category.
In this work, our goal is to construct a technique to
personalized travel planning system through the stereotyping
model (predefined social group approach) to obtain an initial
list of points of interest to travel in the destination city. The
stereotyped model presented is based on K-means, K-Nearest
Neighbor (KNN) algorithm and google maps API. As a case
study, we proposed a technological prototype that
recommends POIs in the city of Cartagena.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 shows the
state of the art; in section 3 and 4 presents the results of the
proposal, finally, some conclusions and future research
directions are outlined.
II. RELATED WORKS
This section briefly reviews related work in the areas
directly associated to recommendation of touristic activities.
According to the author in [4] recommender systems for
the tourism domain can be classified in two groups: systems
that suggest single items like: Triplehop’s TripMatcher and
Vacation Coach [5] and systems that suggest a set of items:
Expedia (www.expedia.com), DieToRecs [6], and Trip@dvice
[7]. The authors also proposed a recommender system allows
the tourist to receive a group of itineraries made up of a set of
correlated events (procession, festival, special market, etc.). In
City Trip Planner [8] the system suggests points of interest
after capturing the tourist’s trip constraints and interests
through a small questionnaire.
 In literature, there are approaches to resolve the problem
of generating according to the users. In [9] a recommender
system is focused on constraint satisfaction is e-Tourism [9],
based on the generation of a personalized tourist plan for the
city of Valencia in Spain.
In [10], present a prototype that stores information (such
as duration, cost, and availability, dates and times) about
travel products in a relational database. Other examples are:
INTRIGUE [11] and Smart Tourist Agenda Recommender
(STAR) [12], recommender systems that suggest itineraries
around the city of Turin (in north Italy), and the tourist guide
in [13] that support users visiting the city of Salamanca
(Spain).
Other relevant research projects with respect to tourist
itineraries have been reported: in [14], a method for deriving a
single multi-modal tourist itinerary is proposed considering a
variety of constraints and following a genetic algorithm-based
approach. P-Tour [15], dynamic tour guide (DTG) [16] and
City Trip Planner [17] personalized user preferences about
specific types of sites are not taken into account; however,
they derive routes day-by-day. The authors in [18], proposed a
heuristic solution for the orienteering problem, that is, they
only consider a single tourist itinerary.
Other group of system recommender used an ontological
approach to resolve the problem of generate tourism itineraries
are: SigTur/E-Destination, use domain ontology to guide the
recommendation process, which permits to make inferences
about the correspondence between the characteristics of an
activity and a certain user profile. SigTur/E-Destination makes
a knowledge-level analysis of the user preferences, including
processes that make bottom-up and top-down propagation of
the preferences over the concepts of the ontology.
III. TOURISM RECOMMENDER SYSTEM
A. Recommendation Approach
Group recommendation techniques consider preferences of
the single-user, thus the group model [20]. In our case, the
system recommends tourist itineraries through the Stereotype
Model maps individual user into one of the predefined groups.
The process to identify user profiles and then generate
recommendation is the follow:
1. The initial stereotypes are manually defined involving
tourism domain expert identifying several variables in
tourist that represents relevant user information and
preference elicitation.
2. The cluster analysis is focuses on grouping objects,
detecting the optimal number of groups and their
composition based on the similarity. In this case, the
results of the process identify 8 clusters (classes) that
can be divided the objects (Tourist):
A: Woman tourist between 18 years and 25 years
B: Woman tourist between 26 years and 36 years
C: Woman tourist between 37 years and 47 years
D: Woman tourist between 48 years and 58 years
E: Male tourist between 18 years and 25 years
F: Male tourist between 26 years and 36 years
G: Male tourist between 37 years and 47 years
H: Male tourist between 48 years and 58 years
3. To match similar users to groups of tourists and
provide recommendations, we create the user’s
neighborhood, calculating the similarity between each
user. Recommendations are computed based on the
stereotype and then normalized given the user affinity
to a stereotype. The model in order to provide
personalized content to the user learns of him/her
thought an algorithm based on KNN (K-Nearest
Neighbors).
4. The data collection comes from various sources: for
POI's is a Google Maps API and datasets to classify
users.
B. Algorithm
In first instance, the algorithm calculates the neighbors
through kNN library for NodeJS. This method is called in a
request POST that takes 2 arguments and returns an object
with a type value and percentage of the accuracy. Then, the
algorithm compares a JSON Object of user profile with similar
tastes using Euclidean distances, returning top K closest
objects according to the stereotype categories.
A RESTFUL service was implemented in NodeJS Express
which uses a library that implements the KNN. This service is
consumed using HTTP POST Request. The interface contains
the next parameters (Figure 1):
• The Messages are in JSON format.
• The first input parameter is an object JSON with the
information of the user to classify.
• The second input parameter is an array of profiles.
• The output is a JSON object (user stereotype).
Once the neighbors are obtained, the system gathered a
user profiles and estimates an itinerary route with some Point
of Interest (POIs) that user may be interested according to
his/her stereotype.
Consequently, the best rated is performed, ordering the
recommended POIs list by user preference in descending order
in a map. Finally, the output is a sequence of attractions or
spots to be visited, through a google map, filtered to the
tourist's according user preferences (interest, day of visit, cost,
etc.).

Fig. 1. Group recommender algorithm using KNN
C. System Architecture
Domain-oriented reference architecture is using in the
proposal according to the following components (figure 2):
• Domain: The domain contains information about the
business domain. The entities and provider are held
here. Providers represent the services interfaces, in our
case the algorithms and suppliers sites. The entities
represent the functionality of recommending points of
interest through similarity algorithms; include routes
and similarities between users.
• Infrastructure: Infrastructure acts as a supporting
library for all the other layers and provides
communication between layers, implements persistence
for business objects.
• Application: It contains the business logic where each
class represents use cases. In this layer, the providers
are referenced and implemented with a framework
injection control.
• Services: This architecture is a powerful constraint on
RESTful Web Services with a decouples server logic
from the client.
Fig. 2. Domain-Oriented reference architecture for generating tourist
itineraries
D. Prototype
The aim of the recommender system is to assist the user to
planning a trip in a city destination according to the user
preferences. The main tasks of the system are: Pre-Trip
planning, generation of activities in the destination city,
generate customized automatic routes, be guided to Point of
Interest in the map, get information, buy ticket to Point of
Interest, and rate Point of Interest and travel agency services.
The recommendation process starts when the user is
categorized. Then the system predicts the points of interest
and the estimated time to make the visit. The system displays
the map image, showing the points of interest listed.
Once the list of recommended items is converted into a
route on the map, the user has the ability to modify and thus
consult and purchase tickets offered by travel agencies in the
city to different points of interest selected. Each point visited
by tourists should be qualified to improve the recommendation
system in order to improve the recommendations of the user
profile. Similarly, the service offered by the travel agency is
valued.
IV. EVALUATION
A. Evaluation of the tourism sector in the city of Cartagena
de Indias
To make the diagnosis of innovation processes in ICT for
tourism in the city of Cartagena, we identified 49 travel
agencies with national registry of tourism. However, only 20
companies were selected according to the following criteria:
size agency, recognition, geographical location and
accessibility to information. The travels agencies interviewed
provide tour packages, transport services, hotels, flights,
cruises, corporate travel and travel insurance.

The aim of the survey was to know the level of innovation

of the travel agencies to ensure that the technological
prototype is according with the company’s demand. The
survey reveals that 28.6% of companies have no IT solution.
71.4% of tourism enterprises have technological applications,
of which 53.33% use applications websites where customers
can search for fares, schedules, travel offers, availability in
hotels and holiday destinations; and 46.7% of companies have
static websites to promote tour packages. The survey shows Fig. 3. User Form to classify tourist
that companies surveyed have no mobile applications or The stereotype algorithm iterates through all stereotypes
systems offering personalized services in tourism. Travel available and adds up the likelihood for each property. The
agencies are agreed that software applications must have new resulting stereotypes are presented to the user in Point of
services that integrate with the following variables Interest images (figure 4). Then the user needs to select one of
"innovation", "usability" and "personalization". these images to refine their user profiles and get better
recommendations.
Technological development and innovation are crucial to
the economic growth of regions; however, in the city of
Cartagena, a low investment is evident in science, technology
and innovation. All these elements, lead to the city of
Cartagena as uncompetitive compared to other tourist
destinations.
Low levels of infrastructure, especially technological,
influence the development of tourism, even when the global
trends go to the Internet promotion and an intensive use of
Information Technology and Communications (ICT).

B. 10 Signals
Cartagena de Indias, is a city located in the north of Fig. 4. Point of Interest images to refine user profiles
Colombia and is considered the most important tourist
destination. Cartagena was the main port of America for the
Spanish Empire during the colonial times, and which earned The stereotype algorithm iterates through all stereotypes
their recognition as a Historical and Cultural Heritage of available and adds up the likelihood for each property. The
mankind by UNESCO in 1984. resulting stereotypes are presented to the user in Point of
Interest images. Then the user needs to select one of these
10 Signals is a prototype that shows the planning of images to refine their user profiles and get better
activities in the city of Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), recommendations (Figure 5).
although it could easily be adapted to other destinations and
even contain different destinations. The system identifies
geographical points of interest and draws a tour that connects
these points in routes based on tourist interests.
The first screen (figure 3) of the application is a form in
which users are asked to provide the socio-demographic data
necessary for determining their stereotype (age and gender).
After filling out the form, the application computes the most
relevant stereotypes based on the information that has
previously been provided by the user. The result of this
classification is a degree of matching with respect to each
stereotype through a number between [0, 1] where 1 denotes
perfect match and 0 denotes mismatch.
Fig. 5. Route planning in a city destination when user are classified in at left
one category
C. Validation of the recommendation method
Personal data and information about general interests of
tourist is used to evaluate the validity of the user classification
and the accuracy of the recommendations. Our approach
requires tourist content data, such as genre, age, interest in
tourism, and other properties. In the first phase of this
research, the evaluation is based only on the stereotypical
model to evaluate the correctness of the stereotypical
classification and the accuracy of recommendations according
to the socio-demographic data and POIs dataset.
We recruited 30 testers in Cartagena de Indias City, 15 males
and 15 females, with ages ranging from 18 to 45 years with a
good technological background. All selected users were
foreign people.
In order to evaluate the recommender model, we made a
satisfaction survey regarding the recommendation they
received. This survey consists of three choice questions, which
have five possible answers: totally disagree, mostly disagree,
neutral, mostly agree and totally agree.
• Q1: It was easy to use this system
• Q2: the information provided by the system is clear and
easy to understand
• Q3: I’m satisfied with the POIs suggested
The 75% of the tester says that the app is easy to use, 80%
think that the app provided clear and easy information and
70% think that they are satisfied with the route suggested.
During the experiment, evaluators could experiment that the
suggested recommendations were in line with the tastes of
tourists. However, the application presents issues like gray
sheep and cold start, which we intend to fix in later versions.
We examine the sensitivity of the results to the number of
stereotypes. The performance improves as one increase the
number of stereotypes. This implies that for recommendation
systems with frequent introduction of new POIs one should set
the number of stereotypes to a relatively large number to
achieve higher predictive performance. This provides strong
evidence towards our system capability to handle unobserved
items too, avoid the cold start problem. The classes A, C, D
and F stereotypes provide the best results.
V. CONCLUSIONS
Today's tourists demand more information focused to
his/her preferences. This paper presents a prototype of a
recommender system in Cartagena City, Colombia, to
recommend a sightseeing tourist route map based on
preferences and interest of each user. The model used a KNN
algorithm to filter and customize the information, in order to
generate a Point of Interest list, as a complete plan where user
can follow it during her/his travel. Group recommendation is
an interesting research area nowadays because usually people
are performing in a social rather than individual manner.
The user model of the recommender system in tourism
considered: socio-demographic information and Information
about the user’s general interests in tourism to construct the
stereotypical classes and explicit preferences to estimates on
the user’s their interest. The paper also describe how new
users are introduced to the system through a stereotype model,
in order to make better recommendation.
The model represents a service in the architecture
proposed according to the Domain Driven Design. We used
DDD because it architecture can help handle complex
behaviors when building software. The proposed architecture,
system implementation, recommendation methods, and
algorithms allow implementing intelligent attraction
information processing that significantly increases the system
usability.
The proposed architecture, system implementation,
recommendation methods, and algorithms allow implementing
intelligent attraction information processing that significantly
increases the system usability.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Research Department of
Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico de Comfenalco.
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