GWAP as a Tool to Analyze, Design, and Test Geo-Social Systems

In this chapter, the authors discuss the state-of-the-art of Geo-Social systems and Recommender systems, which are becoming extremely popular for users accessing social media trough mobile devices. Moreover, they introduce a general framework based on the interaction among those systems and the “Game With A Purpose” (GWAP) paradigm. The proposed framework/platform can help researchers to understand geo-social dynamics in order to design and test new services, such as recommenders of places of interest for tourists, real-time traffic information systems, personalized suggestions of social events, and so forth. To target the governance of such complexity, relevant data must be collected by the investigators, shared with the community, and analyzed to find dynamical patterns that correlate spatial-temporal information with the user’s preferences and objectives. The authors argue that the GWAP approach can be exploited to successfully satisfy many of these tasks.