This presentation shows Near2me, a prototype system implementing a travel recommender concept that generates recommendations that are not only personalized, but also authentic. Exploitation of implicit situational knowledge makes it possible for Near2me to recommend places that are not necessarily touristic or famous, but rather are genuinely representative of place and also match users’ personal interests. The recommendation system makes use of user photos from the image sharing community Flickr.

The focus of this presentation is showing the encouraging results of a user study which allow us to conclude that users are interested in exploring locations, topics, and people from different perspectives and confirm authenticity as a relevance criterion.

Near2me was developed within PetaMedia Network of Excellence.