Contextualized mobile recommendation service based on interactive social network discovered from mobile users

Personal context is the most significant information for providing contextualized mobile recommendation services at a certain time and place. However, it is very difficult for service providers to be aware of the personal contexts, because each person's activities and preferences are very ambiguous and depending on numerous unknown factors. In order to deal with this problem, we have focused on discovering social relationships (e.g., family, friends, colleagues and so on) between people. We have assumed that the personal context of a certain person is interrelated with those of other people, and investigated how to employ his neighbor's contexts, which possibly have a meaningful influence on his personal context. It indicates that we have to discover implicit social networks which express the contextual dependencies between people. Thereby, in this paper, we propose an interactive approach to build meaningful social networks by interacting with human experts. Given a certain social relation (e.g., isFatherOf), this proposed systems can evaluate a set of conditions (which are represented as propositional axioms) asserted from the human experts, and show them a social network resulted from data mining tools. More importantly, social network ontology has been exploited to consistently guide them by proving whether the conditions are logically verified, and to refine the discovered social networks. We expect these social network is applicable to generate context-based recommendation services. In this research project, we have applied the proposed system to discover the social networks between mobile users by collecting a dataset from about two millions of users. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.