Personalization, socialization, and recommendations in location-based services 2.0

The wide increase of web-based user-generated content and social networking technologies have led to the wide popularity of the term Web 2.0, in which the World Wide Web has moved from being an interface for information retrieval to an interactive medium. Following Web 2.0, a flurry of 2.0s have appeared including Library 2.0, Travel 2.0, Government 2.0, and even Revolution 2.0. In this paper, we present our vision of Location-based Services (LBS) 2.0, where users generate significant location-based content, and have meaningful location-aware interactions with both the system and other users. We address three main aspects of LBS 2.0, namely, personalization, socialization, and recommendations. In terms of personalization, LBS 2.0 looks beyond the use of rigid nearest-neighbor queries to more personalized best-neighbor queries where user preferences and context are taken into account when answering queries. In terms of socialization, LBS 2.0 goes beyond using location information as extra attributes in existing social networks to injecting location-awareness into the core functionality of social networks. For recommendations, LBS 2.0 aims to adapt existing commercially successful recommendation techniques to consider the spatial aspects of users and/or items when making its decisions. Overall, we discuss how the confluence of these topics form our vision of LBS 2.0.