Challenges in Recommending Venues within Smart Cities

Recommending venues to a user within a city is a task that has emerged recently with the growing interest in location-based information access. However, the current applications for this task only use the limited and private data gathered by Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) such as Foursquare or Google Places. In this position paper, we discuss the research opportunities that can arise with the use of the digital infrastructure of a smart city, and how the venue recommendation applications can benefit from this infrastructure. We focus on the potential applications of social and physical sensors for improving the quality of the recommendations, and highlight the challenges in evaluating such recommendations.