Towards spatial awareness in recommender systems

Recommender systems aggregate information about users and items to be recommended to generate adequate recommendations. This paper proposes two approaches to include information about spatial releationships of users and items in order to improve the quality of recommendations. The two approaches are compared with non-spatial recommendation using a set of evaluation metrics. Special ramp-up problems, occurring when including spatial information into recommender systems and different application areas for spatial recommender systems are discussed.