Eliciting the users' unknown preferences

Personalized recommendation strongly relies on an accurate model to capture user preferences; eliciting this information is, in general, a hard problem. In the field of tourism this initial profiling becomes even more challenging. It has been shown that particularly in the beginning of the travel decision making process, users themselves are often not conscious of their needs and are not able to express them. In this paper, the basics of a picture-based approach are introduced that aims at revealing implicitly given user preferences. Based on a set of travel related pictures selected by a user, an individual travel profile is deduced. This is accomplished by mapping those pictures onto seven basic factors that reflect different travel behavioral aspects. Also tourism products can be represented by this seven factor model. Thus, this model constitutes the basis of our recommendation algorithm. First tests show that this non-verbal way of interaction is experienced as exiting and inspiring.