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Turist@: Agent-based personalised recommendation of tourist activities

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DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2012.01.086

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 Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329

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Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

Turist@: Agent-based personalised recommendation of tourist activities

Montserrat Batet, Antonio Moreno, David Sánchez ⇑, David Isern, Aïda Valls
Departament d’Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans, 26. 43007 Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Recommender systems in e-Tourism normally focus on helping tourists to select appropriate destina-
Multi-agent systems tions. A related problem that has been less explored in the literature is how to provide personalised rec-
Recommender systems ommendations of cultural and leisure activities when the tourist has already arrived at the destination.
Tourism This paper presents a novel recommendation system, Turist@, which addresses this issue. Its agent-based
modular design permits to model different kinds of activities in a flexible way, and allows the implemen-
tation of a location-aware front-end in the mobile device of the user. Special care has been put in the rec-
ommendation engine, implemented via a specialised Recommender Agent. It incorporates a mixture of
content-based and collaborative recommendation strategies, thus avoiding the drawbacks of each indi-
vidual method, and is able to perform recommendations in heterogeneous scenarios. Recommendations
take into account user profiles which are implicitly updated after the analysis of user actions (e.g., que-
ries, evaluations). The system has been successfully deployed and tested in the World Heritage-listed city
of Tarragona.
Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Tourism has experienced an enormous growth in recent years,
motivated, in part, for the fast development of information and com-
munication technologies and the global spread of Internet (Alptekin
& Büyüközkhan, 2011), which have eased the access to large
amounts of information about destinations, points of interest and
travelling plans to potential tourists all around the world. Nowadays,
e-Tourism (Castillo et al., 2008) enjoys a great success both from an
economic and a social perspective. Many electronic sites and Web
portals offer up-to-date information which is massively used by
tourists to select destinations and plan their trips. Due to the obvious
interest of both tourists and destination providers in selecting enjoy-
able destinations, and taking into account the overwhelming
amount of information available through the Web, many recom-
mender systems have been developed to assist in the process of
choosing travel destinations and planning tourist trips (see an over-
view in Section 2). Considering that Tourism is an activity strongly
connected to personal preferences and interests (Garcia, Sebastia,
& Onaindia, 2011), recommender systems usually rely on ratings
and opinions of previous users to suggest possible destinations.
As will be shown in the related work section, most of the
recommender systems that have been developed in the last years
focus on the analysis and comparison of tourist destinations, to
help the user to select the most appropriate one. However, it is also
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 977256563; fax: +34 977559710.
E-mail addresses: montserrat.batet@urv.cat (M. Batet), antonio.moreno@urv.cat
(A. Moreno), david.sanchez@urv.cat (D. Sánchez), david.isern@urv.cat (D. Isern),
aida.valls@urv.cat (A. Valls).
of great importance for the user to be aware of the specific attrac-
tions that can be visited when he/she has already arrived at a
particular destination. Information about points of interest and
cultural and leisure activities is very dynamic and, in many cases,
difficult to retrieve, analyse and filter. On-site dynamic recommen-
dations play an important role both for the tourist, who is inter-
ested in attractions that he/she may enjoy according to his/her
personal profile, and for the destination provider, who is interested
in increasing the visibility of the available attractions, especially in
the case of low-profile activities in popular destinations, an impor-
tant aspect of the so called sustainable Tourism (Borrás et al., 2011).
In recent years, a scarce number of tourism recommender systems
have focused on this aspect. Unlike the above-mentioned systems,
these approaches should face, in addition to the profile-based
recommendation task, other related issues such as the retrieval
and appropriate consideration of the user’s constraints during the
stay (e.g., in aspects like budget, accessibility, language or agenda),
the dynamic determination of the user’s position and its integra-
tion in a location-aware recommendation process (i.e., geo-locali-
sation of the user and the points of interest), and the inclusion of
a desirable high degree of proactivity and dynamicity in order to
adapt the system’s suggestions to the behaviour of the user at
the destination (Castillo et al., 2008).
The system presented in this paper is framed in this context and
it has been designed with the following main goals in mind: (i) to
provide an easy and ubiquitous access to the desired information
about tourist attractions, (ii) to provide proactive recommenda-
tions of attractions by means of a hybrid recommendation system
that considers elements such as the user profile and preferences,

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2012.01.086
7320 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
the location of the tourist and the activities, and the opinions of
previous tourists, and (iii) to implement a high degree of dynamic-
ity and flexibility so that the system can easily adapt to changes in
the activities and incorporate new information transparently at
execution time.
From a technological perspective, the system relies on agent
technology to provide a solution fitting with the above-mentioned
goals. Agents and multi-agent systems (Wooldridge, 2009) allow
modelling, at a very high level, heterogeneous and distributed sys-
tems and environments, and can act autonomously and proactively
while cooperating between them to solve a complex problem
(Isern, Sánchez, & Moreno, 2011; Isern et al., 2011). Agent-based
systems offer added values thanks to features not found in classical
software engineering paradigms such as elaborated communica-
tive skills, which allow complex negotiation processes, and a high
degree of flexibility and modularity (Moreno, Isern, & Sánchez,
2003; Sánchez, Isern, Rodríguez-Rozas, & Moreno, 2011).
Summarising, this paper presents an agent-based recommender
system called Turist@. The tourist interacts through a graphical
interface with a User Agent that may be running in the user’s mo-
bile phone or PDA. There is a Recommender Agent that stores the
preferences of each user. These preferences are initialised with a
brief questionnaire, but are continuously refined and updated
through the analysis of the actions made by the user in the system
(e.g., the queries he/she makes, or the evaluations performed after
visiting a particular attraction). Thus, a combination of explicit and
implicit techniques is considered to manage the user profile. The
system provides proactive location-based recommendations,
warning the user when it is near an activity that may be interesting
for him/her. The items to be recommended are computed with a
mixture of content-based and collaborative techniques.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses
related works proposing recommenders systems focused on the
Tourism field. Section 3 explains the design and architecture of
the proposed solution, based on a multi-agent system. Section 4
describes the management and update of user profiles. Section 5
describes the different strategies and methods used to implement
the recommendation process according to the user’s preferences.
The final section discusses and summarises the main contributions
of the work.
2. Related work
As stated in Huang and Bian (2009), a travel plan typically con-
sists of several steps, such as choosing the destinations, selecting
tourist attractions, choosing accommodations, deciding routes,
etc. Some of these elements are chosen before the tourists arrive
at the destination (such as the place, accommodation, etc.)
whereas others (such as concrete recreational activities) are com-
monly decided during the tourist stay.
Most of the travel recommender systems developed in the past
(e.g, DieToRecs (Fesenmaier, Ricci, Schaumlechner, & Zanella,
2003), ITR (Ricci, Arslan, Mirzadeh, & Venturini, 2002) or (Delgado
& Davidson, 2002)) have focused on the former issue. The main
problem faced by this kind of systems regards the integration of
heterogeneous sources of information (like Web resources associ-
ated to flight or hotel companies) in order to configure a trip that
matches with the user’s constraints (e.g., budget, calendar) and
preferences (e.g., destination type). In many cases, information
extraction techniques and semantic technologies such as specially
tailored ontologies are used to parse, interpret and integrate infor-
mation stored in heterogeneous sources (Ambite, Barish, Knoblock,
Muslea, & Minton, 2002; Camacho, Aler, Borrajo, & Molina, 2005).
Those systems store a set of preferences of the user that allows
them to rate a collection of destinations.
On the other side, there is a scarcer number of approaches fo-
cused on recommending a list of attractions that the tourist can
visit at the destination. From the user point of view, the recom-
mender will suggest places to visit in a certain geographical area
taking into account his/her profile, computing a tourist daily plan,
with indications about the given timeframe and even instructions
about how to go from one place to another. In order to recommend
satisfactory tourist attractions, it is important to ensure that their
characteristics match with the travellers’ preferences (Huang &
Bian, 2009). However, travel preferences are often hidden and are
not explicitly known when users start to plan their trips, particu-
larly if visiting an unfamiliar place (Loh, Lorenzi, Saldana, &
Licthnow, 2003). Unlike the approaches mentioned above,
attraction recommendations are typically performed on-line at
the destination place according to several dynamic criteria (e.g.,
user’s preferences, timetable, location, etc.). In this case, the main
problem consists on considering and integrating these criteria to
propose a list of recommendations.
User preferences can be obtained in different ways. Usually,
tourists are required to express them explicitly. For example, in
City Trip Planner (Vansteenwegen, Souffriau, Berghe, & Oudheus-
den, 2011) the system suggests points of interest after capturing
the tourist’s trip constraints and interests through a small ques-
tionnaire. These interests are used to predict a personal interest
score for each point of interest. The system, however, is focused
on scheduling and location constraints, considering the GPS coordi-
nates and opening hours of the points of interest to propose a solu-
tion to the ‘‘tourist trip design problem’’, which is a difficult
combinatorial optimisation problem.
Another recent system focused on constraint satisfaction is
e-Tourism (Garcia et al., 2011; Sebastia, García, Onaindia, &
Guzman, 2009), which assists a user on the generation of a per-
sonalised tourist plan for the city of Valencia in Spain. It also allows
for the arrangement and scheduling of the tourist activities by han-
dling different sources of information like opening times, distances
between the places to visit or the time spent on each attraction.
Recommendations are provided by a group of tourists and are
aggregated by the system, which proposes new items based on
group-based recommendations. Intrigue (Ardissono, Goy, Petrone,
Segnan, & Torasso, 2003) is another group-based recommender
system that organises tours and provides an interactive agenda
for scheduling the visits.
In Büyüközkan and Ergün (2011) the authors propose a case-
based reasoning system that permits to search for activities in
which the visitor may be interested. It incorporates a function
called ‘‘search for inspiration’’, intended for the travellers who do
not have a clear idea on the travel date, region to visit or precise
accommodation. The most important drawback of this system is
that it requires the creation of a wide product catalogue annotated
with a set of preference criteria that should be determined a priori.
The approach by Huang and Bian (2009) uses an ontology to model
the information on tourist attractions. It uses a Bayesian network
to match the user’s preferences to those of other travellers with
similar tastes. Tourist attractions are ranked, spatially mapped
and presented to the user.
Other recommenders try to capture implicitly the preferences of
the tourists, by analysing their interaction with the system. For
instance, the application developed in Castillo et al. (2008) dynam-
ically builds a user profile according to his/her past behaviour, and
it recommends places visited by users with similar profiles, com-
puted by means of a case-based reasoning mechanism and the
K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm. An ontology is used to conceptual-
ise the information of the user. The system has been implemented
as a multi-agent system, consisting of three main agents: user
modelling and interface agent, case-based agent, and planning
agent. Another agent-based approach is proposed by Lee, Chang,
 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
and Wang (2009). Their context decision agent first finds concepts
of a specially tailored ontology that match the tourist’s require-
ments. After that, their travel route Recommender Agent uses fuz-
zy logic techniques to select and sort sites of interest.
Recommender systems may be classified in three basic types,
depending on the strategy followed to suggest recommendations:
content-based, collaborative and demographic approaches
(Montaner, López, & Rosa, 2003). In a nutshell, in collaborative fil-
tering approaches (Kruszyk, Ganzha, Gawinecki, & Paprzycki,
2007), recommendations are made by matching users that have
similar preferences and suggesting items they like (e.g., the sys-
tems (Castillo et al., 2008) and (Lee et al., 2009), mentioned above).
This requires several ratings from the users before the system may
begin to make recommendations. This is known as the cold-start
problem (Montaner et al., 2003). Content-based approaches
(Pazzani & Billsus, 2007) recommend items by considering the
content features of items that users have enjoyed previously. Only
items closely related to those the user liked in the past are recom-
mended. To perform this kind of recommendation, it is required to
build a user profile that stores the degree of interest (i.e., a score)
on each of the different criteria that describe an activity. Such
information can be extracted by fill-in forms but, as the set of char-
acteristics can be quite large, it is known that this process is not
adequate because long questionnaires result in inconveniences
for the participants in a survey. Therefore, many systems do not
only consider the explicit information offered by the users but also
the implicit information given by their interaction with the system.
Demographic recommenders categorise users according to stereo-
typical classes and base the recommendations on general features
related to those classes. Rough recommendations result from these
approaches as individual preferences are not considered.
To overcome the limitations of these individual recommenda-
tion schemas, some authors propose hybrid approaches (Burke,
2000; Salter & Antonopoulus, 2006), aiming to incorporate the ben-
efits of these strategies. The most commonly combined schemas are
collaborative and content-based ones (Schiaffino & Amandi, 2009),
even though there exist some examples combining demographic
and content-based recommendations (Garcia et al., 2011). For
example, in Schiaffino and Amandi (2009) the authors present
Traveller, an expert agent in the tourism and travel domain, which
combines content-based user profiles, collaborative filtering, and
also demographic user profiles to make recommendations. How-
ever, it is focused on the selection of holidays packages rather than
the suggestion of particular attractions at the destination.
In conclusion, works proposing hybrid recommendation ap-
proaches for dynamic, proactive and personalised tourist recom-
mendations at the destination, like the one proposed in this
paper, are scarce.
3. Design and development of the recommender system
This section provides a thorough description of Turist@. First,
we describe the design decisions that led to the adoption of agent
technology for this application. After that, the agent-based archi-
tecture of Turist@ is presented, and the functionalities of each of
the agents are explained in detail.
3.1. Design considerations
A system that aims to provide on-site dynamic recommenda-
tions of activities needs to have information, on the one side, about
the preferences and interests of each user and, on the other side,
about all the activities and events that are available in the city.
Let us analyse these two aspects in detail.
7321
Concerning the profile of the users, there are two basic possibil-
ities. One of them is that each user keeps an internal hidden profile,
created from information explicitly given by the user. In that case,
the system cannot access this information, and it cannot personal-
ise the recommendations; however, the user interface may filter
the recommended activities that suit the user preferences. This
possibility imposes a heavy burden on the interface side, which
could be continuously receiving information of hundreds of activ-
ities totally unrelated to the user interests. The other possibility,
which is the one that has been adopted in Turist@, is to keep a cen-
tralised database with the profiles of all the users of the system.
Some of the advantages of this design are the following: the profile
may be dynamically managed by the system (updating it automat-
ically after analysing the actions of the user), the system filters the
activities that are appropriate for each user (thereby removing this
work from all the user interfaces) and the system may compare the
preferences and explicit event evaluations of different users, allow-
ing the implementation of effective collaborative recommendation
techniques.
Regarding the cultural and leisure activities, it is important to
take into account that their number may be very large, and they
may be generated dynamically by several organisations. Thus, it
may be complex to keep a centralised database with all the differ-
ent events, and it might be computationally expensive to access
such a database to answer the explicit queries of each user. One de-
sign possibility that alleviates this problem is to keep small dat-
abases focused on particular kinds of events (e.g., a database of
sportive events). Then, as the system will have several small repos-
itories, it is necessary to add an intermediate layer between the
user interface and these repositories that handles the queries of
the users and transforms them into queries to the appropriate
databases.
Another important design issue relates to the user interface. The
intention is that the system is location-aware, i.e. the system
knows which is the position of the user in the city (up to a certain
precision) and it can suggest proactively events that are near and
coincide with the user interests. Therefore, the user interface
should be running in a mobile device (smart phone, PDA) with
some kind of embedded geo-localisation service (e.g., GPS, now
available virtually in all high-level phones) but, at the same time,
it must be able to communicate the user inputs (queries, event
evaluations) and receive the system outputs (recommendations)
to/from the rest of the system, which will be running in fixed com-
puters. Thus, it must clearly be a distributed system.
Agent technology was chosen for the design and implementa-
tion of Turist@ because its main properties fit well with the system
requirements commented in the previous paragraphs:
 Agent technology is especially appropriate for the development
of distributed systems.
 Each user of the system may have a personal User Agent run-
ning in his/her mobile device, which may communicate with
the rest of the agents of the system.
 It is possible to define several areas and keep a small database
with the events associated to each area, and provide a specific
agent that controls the access to each of these repositories. This
design also allows the easy addition or removal of an area.
 The recommendation techniques may be embedded in a specia-
lised Recommender Agent, which may keep a database with all
the user profiles and update them dynamically by receiving
information from the user queries and evaluations. This agent
may also provide proactive recommendations, as it may be con-
tinuously aware of the location of the user. As it has the infor-
mation of all the users of the system, it can easily apply
collaborative recommendation techniques.
7322 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
 It is possible to add to the system a Broker Agent that acts as a
gateway between the User Agents and the information of the
activities stored in several databases, hiding the distributed
storage of the information from the rest of the system.
The next section describes in more detail the architecture of the
system and the behaviour of each type of agent.
3.2. Architecture and functionalities of Turist@
Fig. 1 shows the architecture of Turist@. It has been designed
and implemented as a multi-agent system, with the following
types of agents:
 User Agents–There is one User Agent for each tourist that wants
to access the system. It provides a graphical interface that offers
several services, such as receiving personalised recommenda-
tions, searching for activities with particular characteristics or
updating the profile.
 Activity Agents–There is one agent of this kind for each type of
activity considered in the system. In the prototype that has been
implemented, the activities that have been included are Sights,
Museums, Itineraries, Exhibitions, Conferences, Concerts,
Sports, Cinemas and Theatres. Thanks to the system modularity
and the flexibility of multi-agent systems, it is possible to add/
remove activity types at runtime, adapting the system to partic-
ular cities, areas or daily changes.
 Broker Agent - Provides a gateway between the User Agents and
the Activity Agents.
 Recommender Agent–Its main aim is the recommendation of
activities according to the user’s preferences. In addition, this
agent keeps and updates the information about the interests
of each user on the different classes of activities.
The following paragraphs describe in more detail the function-
ality of each type of agent and its interactions with the other
agents of the system, whereas Sections 4 and 5 will focus on the
management of the user profile and the personalised recommen-
dation processes.
3.2.1. User Agent
The User Agent associated to each user may be running in a mo-
bile device (smart phone or PDA, preferably with geo-positioning
Fig. 1. Architecture of the Turist@ system.
capabilities), so that the tourist can interact with it at any moment
from any point of the city. Its main aim is to provide an intuitive
graphical interface to the user to enable the search for activities
and reception of recommendations. Moreover, the User Agent is
the gateway for the user with the rest of the agents in the system.
When a new tourist wants to use the system and a new instance
of the User Agent is initialised, the first task is to show to the user a
brief questionnaire (see Fig. 2) requesting some personal and
demographic data (e.g. age, spoken languages, nationality) and its
degree of interest in some areas. In order to ease this task and col-
lect the maximum amount of user information, the user prefer-
ences are represented through questions about specific areas
such as History, Science, Music, Art, Sports, Cinema and Theatre.
As users are prefer expressing opinions using qualifiers than with
continuous numerical values, preferences are expressed by means
of five linguistic labels (Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very
High), which are internally translated to numerical values (0,
0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1, respectively). This information is sent to the
Recommender Agent, and it provides an initial rough picture of
the preferences of the user, that can be used to guide the persona-
lised recommendations of the system. However, as will be detailed
in Section 4, the user profile is not static, but it is dynamically up-
dated after each interaction of the tourist with the system.
The interface provided by the User Agent allows the tourist to
search for activities that satisfy a given set of constraints. As shown
in Fig. 3, the parameters that may be specified in a search are the
kind of activity, the accessibility of the activity for handicapped
people, the possibility of having guided visits, the languages in
which the activity is performed, the date in which the activity is
held, the recommended age for the activity, and the availability
of reduced prices for special users (e.g. an activity may be free
for senior people, children or University students). The user can
also specify in the search a maximum fee he/she is willing to pay
to attend an activity. All this information is sent to the Broker
Agent, which manages the search appropriately as will be detailed
in Section 3.2.3.
The User Agent interface also allows the tourist to request
explicitly personalised recommendations. In that case, the request
is sent to the Recommender Agent, which will match the user pro-
file with the characteristics of all the events available in the city
(content-based recommendation) and/or it will select those activ-
ities that other users with similar profiles have previously enjoyed
(collaborative recommendation). This procedure will be detailed in
M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329 7323

Fig. 2. Initial user’s profile.

Fig. 3. Search criteria for activity retrieval.

7324 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
Fig. 4. Recommended activities shown (circled) according to user’s location.
Section 5. The activities that are more suitable to the user are sent
to the User Agent, who shows them to the tourist as a list in the
graphical interface (see Fig. 4). Then, the tourist can select any of
the recommended items to have more detailed information (e.g.
picture, address, opening times).
3.2.2. Activity Agent
Activity Agents are generic entities that manage the informa-
tion of particular attractions (e.g, Exhibitions, Museums, Cinema,
Theatre, Sports, etc.). Each one has a local database in which it
stores the information about specific events of a certain type that
are going to take place in the city (e.g., the Exhibitions Agent has
information about all the exhibitions currently available in the city
and those that are scheduled for the near future). In the current
prototype, these local databases are fed with the information pro-
vided by the local Tourism office, through the graphical interfaces
provided by these agents.
The generic design of these Activity Agents allows modifications
to tailor the design to specific circumstances. For example, in the
current prototype, due to the information provided by each mu-
seum is much more complex than the data associated to a single
event, it was decided to have one particular Museum Agent for
each museum in town. Each museum has the responsibility of
updating the information available about the museum activities
in the local database of its corresponding Museum Agent. All the
Museum Agents are connected to a Museum Coordinator Agent,
which is their gateway with the rest of the agents of the system.
Specially tailored agents derived from the generic design of Activ-
ity Agents improve the flexibility of the system.
When an event is added to the system (see Fig. 5, with the inter-
face to add a new itinerary), the complete description of the event
is saved into the database that is managed by the corresponding
Activity Agent. Moreover, in order to make the system more effi-
cient, a subset of this information is sent both to the Broker Agent
and to the Recommender Agent. As a result, these agents have a
cache of activities from which they can make quick searches,
avoiding the time-consuming process of making queries to all
the Activity Agents about all of their activities every time an
activity search or a recommendation is requested. In particular,
only the specific information required to filter activities is sent to
those agents (e.g. type of activity or if it offers guided visits or not).
3.2.3. Broker Agent
The Broker Agent is a facilitator of the communication between
the User Agents and the Activity Agents. When it receives a query
from the user, it can search in its local database (for each activity,
only the information associated to search parameters is stored),
which are the activities that fulfil the required conditions. After
having solved the search, it requests to the involved Activity
Agents all the additional information associated to each of the
query results. For instance, if one of the results is an exhibition,
it requests to the Exhibition Agent the complete data of that event
(address, time, name of the artist, etc.). In that way, it can show to
the user the complete information of all the results of the search.
This agent is also involved in the implicit profile user update
(widely explained in Section 4.2).
3.2.4. Recommender Agent
The main aim of this agent is to perform recommendations to
users according to their profiles. These profiles, as will be detailed
in Section 4, store the preferences of the users in relation to the se-
ven areas mentioned above. The initial preferences are given di-
rectly by the user in the initial questionnaire (see Fig. 2);
however, they are dynamically updated by the Recommender
Agent through the analysis of the information provided by the
interaction of the user with the system. In particular, as will be
seen in Section 4, the profile is updated implicitly taking into
account the results of the queries made by the user and his/her
explicit evaluation of attended events.
The Recommender Agent also keeps a database with some
items about the activities available in the city in order to have a
quick access to their main features. In that way, when an explicit
or implicit recommendation process is needed, it can easily com-
pare the interests of the user with the characteristics of the avail-
able events. In addition, when a recommendation is requested, a
filtering process is executed over the available activities. When it
 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
Fig. 5. Adding a new Itinerary to the activity database.
has discovered which are the activities that fit better with the pref-
erences of the user, it can request to the appropriate Activity
Agents their full information. These data are sent to the User Agent
that shows it to the user in its graphical interface.
4. Dynamic management of the user profile
In order to assess which are the activities more suitable for the
user, it is necessary to keep a profile with updated information
about his/her preferences. In this section, we describe which infor-
mation is stored in the user profile and how it is continuously
updated as a result of the analysis of the interaction of the user
with the system. After that, in the next section we explain how
the system can provide both content-based and collaborative pro-
active recommendations.
As described in Section 3.2.1, the user profile stores some basic
demographic data (birth date, nationality, level of studies, spoken
languages, kind of travel group, disabilities), start and end date of
the trip, and a level of interest in seven areas (Art, History, Science,
Music, Sport, Cinema, Theatre). The demographic data, travel dates
and an initial assessment of the interest level in the seven catego-
ries are obtained with a brief questionnaire filled by the user when
the corresponding User Agent is initialised (recall Fig. 2). As ex-
plained in Section 3.2.1, the interest levels are represented with
qualitative labels (Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High),
which are internally represented with values between 0 and 1.
Thus, the information on the user preferences is finally represented
by 7 numerical values. It is important to know that the system also
keeps, for each individual activity available in the city, the degree
of relevance of that activity for the seven chosen areas or features
(also represented by a numerical value between 0 and 1). So, for
7325
instance, a conference about the most relevant sportive and musi-
cal events in Tarragona during the Roman Empire could have high
values in the History, Music and Sport categories, but low values in
Art, Science, Cinema and Theatre. In addition, according to this ini-
tial profile, Turist@ classifies each new user into a group of tourists
with similar preferences. In this way, the system is able to make
recommendations in which the preferences and previous experi-
ences of those similar users can be considered.
One of the most interesting aspects of Turist@ is its ability to
keep refining the knowledge about the user preferences as it
receives information from the actions performed by the user in
the system. Turist@ includes mechanisms that allow an automatic
update of the user profile in two moments in an implicit and in an
explicit way (Moukas, 1997): after the user evaluates explicitly an
event that he/she has attended, and after the user makes a query.
These updating methods are described in the following
subsections.
4.1. Profile update after an explicit evaluation
In explicit profile updating, the system requires that the user
evaluates the recommended activities by indicating how interest-
ing or relevant an item is for him/her (see Fig. 6). There are differ-
ent approaches to update the user profile according to the method
used to get the relevance feedback (Montaner et al., 2003). Like/
dislike approaches require that the user judges items in a binary
scale. Rating approaches require that the user provides judgements
in a discrete scale (numeric or symbolic using linguistic labels
mapped to a numeric scale). Finally, textual approaches gather
comments and present them to the user. In this work, the explicit
profile update is done by means of a rating approach. In addition,
7326 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
Fig. 6. The system requests the user to give his/her opinion on a previous activity.
Table 1
Modifying factors of the user profile after an explicit
evaluation.
Qualitative evaluation Adding factor
Very Bad v2
Bad v1
Good 0
Very Good v1
Excellent v2
we can distinguish between positive feedback (items liked by the
user) and negative feedback (items that the user did not like).
In more detail, in our proposal, the user can indicate which of
the recommended activities he/she is interested in attending. The
Recommender Agent stores this information. Daily, the Recom-
mender Agent checks which are the activities that were held the
day before and were attended by the user and it requests to the
corresponding User Agent to ask the user about his/her opinion
on the event. This evaluation is qualitative using linguistic terms:
{Very Bad, Bad, Good, Very Good, Excellent}. This information is
sent to the Recommender Agent to update the user profile.
The idea is to increase/decrease the degrees of preference on the
features relevant for the evaluated activity, depending on the
degree of user’s interest on it. For instance, taking the conference
example proposed above, a positive evaluation should increase
the interest on History, Music and Sport, whereas a negative eval-
uation should decrease the interest on these three features. In par-
ticular, some authors claim that negative evaluations usually
produce an improvement in the system’s performance (Montaner
et al., 2003). Note that the preferences on the other items (e.g. Cin-
ema) should not be affected by the evaluation of this conference.
The degree of change on the preference depends on the strength
of the positive/negative feedback; this is done using the values
shown in Table 1.
So, for instance, if the user evaluates as ‘‘Very Good’’ the previ-
ous conference, his/her preference levels on History, Sports and
Music will be increased in v1. If the evaluation was ‘‘Very Bad’’,
each of the preference levels on these three areas in the user profile
would be decreased by v2. It is checked that the updated prefer-
ence value is still in the [0, 1] interval.
4.2. Implicit profile update
In implicit profile updating, the system automatically infers the
user’s preferences by monitoring his/her actions (Rich, 1979). A
clear example of implicit feedback can be found in Web pages.
We can obtain feedback by analysing the links followed by the
user, the navigation history, or the time spent on a particular
Web page (Velásquez & Parade, 2007). Other applications can con-
sider other aspects of the user’s behaviour such as if a document
has been saved or printed, or monitoring the scrolling or the resiz-
ing of the window. In our prototype we have designed a way to
implicitly update the user profile considering the results obtained
when the user searches for activities.
After having answered a query from the user, the Broker Agent
informs the Recommender Agent about the results of the query
made by the user. These events are potentially interesting for the
user, since they satisfy the requirements of a specific query pro-
vided by him/her. Thus, this information can be very valuable to
refine automatically the knowledge about the interests of the user.
A query may be conceptualised as an implicit description of the
preferences of the user. For example, if the user requests for the-
atre plays available on the city for the next weekend, it is implicitly
telling us that he/she is interested in events related to the Theatre
feature (which may not be just theatre plays, but other events like
conferences or exhibitions related to theatrical aspects, like a con-
ference on Hamlet or an exhibition on Shakespeare’s life). More-
over, queries also provide negative information, on the features
in which the user is not interested. For instance, if all the events
sent to the user as results of his/her requests are unrelated to
Sports, it seems reasonable to infer a lack of interest in sportive
activities. These intuitions are formalised as follows. Let us take
an activity a that is the result of a query of the user. The activity
a is represented by a vector of 7 values between 0 and 1 that de-
note the relationship of that event with the seven defined areas
(Art, History, Science, Music, Sport, Cinema, Theatre), so that
a = (a1, a2,. . ., an), with n = 7. Let us also consider the user profile
u = (u1, u2,. . .un), where each component on the vector profile rep-
resents the user’s degree of preference in the same n areas. Then,
the update of each of the seven components of the user profile is
modulated by a threshold d and two fixed values v1 and v2 as
follows, where 1 < = i <= 7:
 If ai  ui > d then ui = ui + v1
 If d > ai  ui > 0 then ui = ui + v2
 If d > ui  ai > 0 then ui = ui  v2
 If ui  ai > d then ui = ui  v1
These expressions increase or decrease the degree of interest of
the user for each of the areas, depending on the current value of
interest and the difference between this value and the relevance
of that area for the activity a. The idea is that v1 > v2, so that the
change in the user profile is bigger in the first and the last cases,
when the difference has a value exceeding a given threshold. The
three parameters d, v1 and v2 can be customised to define a hard
or soft update policy.
5. Personalised recommendations
The main feature of Turist@ is its ability to provide personalised
recommendations of activities to the tourists that visit a city. The
main idea is to use the information stored in the user profile in or-
der to assess which are the events interesting for each particular
tourist may be interested, avoiding an over-recommendation of
activities. Turist@ is a hybrid recommender system, as it combines
content-based and collaborative recommendations. In both cases,
the activities to be recommended are filtered according to their
type of activity, language, date of performance, recommended
age and price before showing them to the user.
In our system, we consider that recommendations can be done
on demand and proactively. The former are explicitly requested by
the user, through an option available in the graphical interface pro-
vided by the User Agent. The latter are directly provided by the
Recommender Agent (without an explicit user request) when it
notices that the user is near an activity that may be interesting
for him/her. The system is always aware of the position of the user
within the city (through the information provided by GPS), and it
also knows the geographical location of each activity, so it can pro-
vide this location-aware proactive recommendations on the fly.
 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
In order to decide which activities suit better the taste of the
user, there must be a way of comparing the preferences of the user,
stored in the user profile, with the characteristics of the activity.
Recall that both elements are stored with the same representation:
a vector of seven numerical values that represent the preferences
of the user (or the relevance of an activity) for each of the seven
features defined in the system.
5.1. Content-based recommendations
This kind of recommendations evaluates the relationship be-
tween a single user and the descriptions of the available activities.
This strategy is used by the system when the number of users is
low and it is not yet possible to use a collaborative approach.
This approach requires some matching technique between the
user profile and the set of evaluated items (i.e. activities). Every
item is represented by a feature vector. In our case, due to both
the user profile and the characteristics of an event are repre-
sented by n-dimensional vectors, u and a respectively, this match-
ing can be done by applying a distance function over the vectors
u and a. A variety of distance measures between feature vectors
may be used to compute the similarity of two items. The system
allows the designer to choose between different distance
functions.
The most basic one is the normalised Euclidean distance:
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Pn 2
i¼1 ðui  ai Þ
d¼ pffiffiffi
n
This distance provides a value between 0 and 1. In particular,
the system allows the definition of a threshold U below which
the activities a are considered close enough to the user profile u
(i.e., those events that are located at a distance lower than the
given threshold). So, those activities with a distance to the user
profile in d 2 [0, U ] would be the ones recommended to the user.
One of the main problems of this distance is that it considers all
the information of the activities, even the features in which the
user is not interested. So, an activity could be not recommended
because a few features have extremely different values with re-
spect to the user preferences even though the user is not interested
on these features. Notice that if a user is interested only in History
and Art, we should probably focus on activities that are very re-
lated to these two aspects, without considering the other activity
features defined in the application.
A possibility to avoid this problem is to restrict the features con-
sidered during the computation of the Euclidean distance by eval-
uating only those features in which the user is highly interested
(e.g., those with an interest over 0.75). Even though the formula
would be the same than (1), only the features with uiPr will be
included, where r 2 [0, 1].
If one considers the Euclidean distance, all features would be
equally important. However, human judgment of similarity be-
tween two items often gives different weights to different attri-
butes. So, a better approach to user’s judgments is based on a
weighted linear combination of the differences between each
feature (Debnath, Ganguly, & Mitra, 2008). Thus, we propose to
introduce a weight for each component representing a feature,
so that the features that are more relevant for the user will play
a more important role in the computation of the distance. The
idea is to use the degree of preference of the user for each activity
feature (ui) as the weight for the ith component of the distance (in
this case the Euclidean distance), as shown in the following
formula:
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
sP
n 2
i¼1 ½ðui  ai Þ  ui 
d¼ Pn
i¼1 ui
7327
Other kinds of functions have been considered. In particular, the
minimum distance between each pair of interests of the user and
the features of the activity.
d¼u8iiPr Minjui  ai j ð3Þ
This function can be extended by requesting a minimum num-
ber of features m in which the interest of the user has to be ui P r.
The system also allows computing the distance between user
preferences and activity features, by counting the number of com-
ponents in which the user preference is above a threshold r1 and,
at the same time, the activity punctuation is above a threshold r2.
Counti ððui > r1 Þ ^ ðai > r2 ÞÞ
s¼1 ð4Þ
n
Finally, we propose a more general comparison expression that
evaluates two aspects: the adequacy of the activity to the user
preferences (measured with one of the proposals for d), and the
global interest of the activity in all the features considered in the
application. The assumption is that those activities that are highly
valued with respect to most of the activity features should be of
interest to most users. The weight of the two aspects may be tuned
with two parameters a and b, as shown in the following equation:
X
n
d0 ¼ a ai þ bðdðai ; ui ÞÞ ð5Þ
i¼1
The activity would be recommended if ui P r 2 [0,1] where r is
ð1Þ a user preference threshold and d0 2 [0, U ], and U is the distance
value above which the activities would be recommended.
The Turist@ system allows the designer to customise the rec-
ommendations by choosing the most appropriate distance mea-
sure and its parameters, as shown in the following Fig. 7.
5.2. Collaborative recommendations
The idea of collaborative recommendation techniques is to sug-
gest to the user activities that have been positively evaluated by
other users with similar preferences. In collaborative filtering pro-
posing a recommendation consists on finding similar users, select-
ing those users with a high proximity (creating a neighbourhood)
and, finally, selecting the set of items to be recommended.
Therefore, the first step is to discover tourists with similar char-
acteristics. In collaborative recommenders, one of the most com-
mon techniques used to group similar users is clustering (Everitt,
Landau, Leese, & Stahl, 2011). As a result, tourists are classified into
different classes (clusters). However, the clustering process re-
quires a minimum number of users to be applicable (e.g., 50) so
that the resulting classes can be representative enough.
In our system, the clustering process is dynamically repeated
(e.g., every time 10 new users have entered the system), in order
to update the description of the classes of individuals that are using
Turist@. Note that the clustering process has a relatively high com-
putational cost, so it is not very advisable to apply it with each new
user.
The clustering algorithm that has been employed is ClusDM
(Valls, 2003; Valls, Batet, & López, 2009), which generates a crisp
partition. It uses an agglomerative hierarchical clustering tech-
nique, and it takes into account both the interests of the users
and their demographic data (country of origin, age, level of studies,
etc). The system includes different distance functions that may be
used to assess the similarity between users (Manhattan, Canberra,
Minkowski, Mean Character Difference, etc).
The concrete implementation of the clustering algorithm has
been embedded in an autonomous agent, called ClusDMA (ClusDM
Agent) (Valls, Moreno, & Sánchez, 2002). This agent receives as
ð2Þ
input the information of the users, and it performs a classification
7328 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
Fig. 7. Different recommendation techniques offered by Turist@.
in clusters (the hierarchical tree generated by the algorithm is cut
at an appropriate level to generate the appropriate number of
classes).
After that it is needed to create the neighbourhood of users (i.e. to
find users with higher proximity). ClusDMA receives the informa-
tion of a particular user and it creates a list of the classes, ranked
and labelled according to the degree of similarity between the user
and all the members of each class. The labels that have been consid-
ered are the following: {‘‘Worst’’, ‘‘Terrible’’, ‘‘VeryBad’’, ‘‘Bad’’,
‘‘NotRecommendable’’, ‘‘Inappropriate’’, ‘‘Borderline’’, ‘‘Acceptable’’,
‘‘Adequate’’, ‘‘Recommendable’’, ‘‘FairlyGood’’, ‘‘Good’’, ‘‘VeryGood’’,
‘‘Excellent’’, ‘‘Optimum’’}. Then, if there is not any class above the
‘‘Acceptable’’ level, it is considered that is not possible to make
any collaborative recommendation because there is not any class
similar enough to the user. Otherwise, we can create the neighbour-
hood by taking the users contained in the cluster whose tag is the
closest one to ‘‘Optimum’’ (e.g. if the clustering results provides 7
clusters labelled as ‘‘Excellent’’, ‘‘Good’’, ‘‘Recommendable’’, ‘‘Not-
Recommendable’’, ‘‘Terrible’’, ‘‘VeryBad’’ and ‘‘Bad’’, the users of
the cluster ‘‘Excellent’’ would be selected).
The final step is the recommendation of activities. The system
considers all the items recommended to the set of users contained
in the selected cluster. Then, the system proposes to the current
user those items that can be recommended to all the other users
in the same cluster, following the content-based recommendation
process defined above.
6. Discussion and Conclusions
The described system has been implemented in Java using the
JADE (Bellifemine, Caire, & Greenwood, 2007) framework to sup-
port the development and execution of the multi-agent system.
The JADE-Leap extension has been used to enable the execution
of agents in portable devices with limited hardware such as smart
phones or PDAs.
Several tests have been conducted with real data from the
World Heritage-listed city of Tarragona (Spain) incorporating
information of dozens of activities (location, price, timetable, top-
ics, etc.), which have been modelled via the described agents. Users
have tested the system using portable devices and exploiting the
geo-localisation capabilities of modern smart phones and data ex-
change with the server via GPRS/UMTS. The different types of rec-
ommendation strategies have been tested via explicit and implicit
ratings performed by the testers. The system has been developed in
the course of four years and it has been demonstrated in several
scientific events. It has also been awarded two prizes by the Cata-
lan Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Turning to the main conclusions it can be argued, on the one
hand, that agent technology has brought several benefits to both
the design and execution of the proposed system. First, multi-agent
systems allow a more realistic modelling of the involved entities
thanks to the modularisation capabilities and the high level com-
munication skills. In this manner, the system can be easily split
in several parts to be executed on the server or client sides, mini-
mising the load in lightweight devices such as smart phones. This
modularisation also adds a great degree of flexibility because new
agents with new activities can be added dynamically at runtime.
Changes and suppressions of running agents are also supported
and integrated seamlessly within the execution of the platform,
improving the robustness of the system. The fact that agents are al-
ways running at the client side, continuously monitoring the ac-
tions of the users, adds a desirable degree of proactivity to the
recommendations, considering both the users’ preferences and
restrictions (such as their location).
On the other hand, the different types of recommendation strat-
egies implemented in the system cover many diverse situations,
ranging from new users who explicitly introduce their profile to
those who have already enjoyed and rated past activities. This over-
comes the limitations imposed by individual recommendation
schemas (i.e., collaborative and content-based) that either require
 M. Batet et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 39 (2012) 7319–7329
several ratings before proposing recommendations or are limited to
activities similar to those enjoyed by the user in the past. The infor-
mation about the user is captured in implicit and explicit ways, rep-
resenting the user’s interests in his/her profile and allowing the
automatic management of dynamic changes in the user’s behaviour
or preferences that can be inferred from previous experiences and
transparently incorporated into the recommendation process.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili
(2009AIRE-04), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
(DAMASK project, Data mining algorithms with semantic knowl-
edge, TIN2009-11005) and the Spanish Government (PlanE, Span-
ish Economy and Employment Stimulation Plan). The initial
version of the system was funded by an internal grant of the Agent-
Cities.NET European project. The authors would also like to thank
the contribution to Turist@ of several students during the course
of its development (Alexandre Viejo, Marc Redondo and Pilar
Zapata).
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