Therefore, in order to improve the recommen-
dations, we have to take into account the contex-
tual information available as additional categories
of data (Leiva et al., 2012). In (Adomavicius and
Tuzhilin, 2011) the authors affirm that the recom-
mender system should take into consideration three
dimensions (users, items and context). They propose
different paradigms of context-aware recommender
systems:
• Contextual pre-filtering (or contextualization of
recommendation input): contextual information
drives data selection or data construction for that
specific context. The selected data will be the in-
put of a 2D recommender system.
• Contextual post-filtering (or contextualization of
recommendation output): the ratings are predicted
using any traditional 2D recommender system on
the entire data. Afterwards, the resulting set of
recommendations is adjusted (contextualized) for
each user using the contextual information.
• Contextual modeling (or contextualization of rec-
ommendation functions). In this recommendation
paradigm, contextual information is used directly
in the modeling technique as part of rating estima-
tion.
In our opinion, a recommender system for a con-
solidated tourist destination (probably with thousands
of POIs) should apply the contextual pre-filtering
paradigm. Thus, the recommender system works with
a reduced number of POIs, decreasing the execution
time. Another important advantage of this approach
is that it can be combined with any existing 2D rec-
ommendation techniques.
The recommender system proposed in this paper
uses a content-based contextual pre-filtering, based
on contextual attributes and desirable characteristics
of the POIs. Therefore, it is not necessary to have
information about previous visits or qualifications of
other tourists.
Some authors (Zenebe and Norcio, 2009) propose
the use of fuzzy logic as a formal basis for recom-
mender systems. Nevertheless we are looking for a
new approach which allows us to also cover another
question proposed in (Adomavicius and Tuzhilin,
2005): incorporation of diverse contextual informa-
tion into the recommendation process. In this paper
we tackle this issue by means of the Formal Concept
Analysis (FCA).
From the point of view of Philosophy, a concept
is a general idea that corresponds to some kind of en-
tity and that may be characterized by some essential
features of the class. When B. Ganter and R. Wille
(Wille, 1982; Ganter and Wille, 1999) conceive a
framework inside the lattice theory to formalize con-
cepts, they probably do not guess the wide diffusion
of their original work.
Nowadays, FCA has become an useful framework
both in the theoretical and in the applied areas. The
works related to FCA cover from data analysis, infor-
mation retrieval, knowledge representation, etc. It is
considered an outstanding tool in emergent environ-
ments like data mining, semantic web, etc.
The main goal of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA)
is to identify in a binary table the relationships be-
tween set of objects and set of attributes. These rela-
tionships establish a Gallois Connection which allows
us to identify the concepts using a formal framework
inside the lattice theory. Apart from building the con-
cept lattice itself, one of the key problems is to ex-
tract the set of attribute implications which hold in
the concept lattice. Implications constitute important
information that is extracted in a separate stage from
data and constitute a dual representation of the lattice
itself. One of the most important advantages in the
use of implications is that they may be managed using
Functional Dependencies Logics (Armstrong, 1974).
Another novelty in this work is the integration of
the context into the FCA method by means of set of
implications. We propose the generation of a set of
fuzzy implications which corresponds with a given
context. Thus, when the user identifies his/her context
(company, weather, etc), the system enriches the spec-
ification by adding a set of new implications which
corresponds with this context. The new information
is treated with our fuzzy logic to automatically re-
duce the specification by removing redundancy. The
reduction in the set of implications allows a more ef-
ficient validation process which prune the original set
of POIs, and therefore the content-based 2D recom-
mender works with a smaller set of POIs. In figure 1
the system architecture of our proposal is depicted.
The paper is organized as follows: in the next sec-
tion we analyze some related works. Section 3 in-
troduces the theoretical background of our work and
Section 4 describes an executable logic to manage
fuzzy implications, named FSL. It will be used in
section 5 to introduce a context-aware recommender
system with a solid base. Finally some conclusions
and future works are presented.
2 RELATED WORKS
In (Zenebe and Norcio, 2009) fuzzy logic is presented
as a proper framework for tourist recommenders, ad-
dressing the problems described in (Adomavicius and
Tuzhilin, 2005). Particularly, their approach uses fea-
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