Introducing Context in Climbing Crags Recommender System in Arco, Italy

Outdoor sport climbing is a sport where contextual information of a climber is essential for deciding which place should be visited. Very often, climbing places (such as crags) have specific characteristics which affect climbers’ choices. For instance, some crags are accessible to children, while others are not. Moreover, crags that are supposed to be visited in winter become too hot for climbing in summer. These contextual factors contribute to the problem of choosing suitable climbing crags for tourists who are practicing this sport. There exists a content-based system for climbing crags recommendations, but it does not offer tools to learn climbing contextual information. To address this issue, we developed a web solution for crags recommendations, where climbers can adjust their subjective level of importance for certain crags features and contextual factors with a preference-based elicitation panel. This system, firstly, allows climbers to define their preferences with the sliders; secondly, it offers crags recommendations based on the previous visits made by the most similar climber. We evaluated the system online with a user study (within-subjects design), where 40 experienced outdoor climbers tried two websites for crags recommendations for their planned trip to Arco, Italy, and answered recommender system questions. The results showed that the proposed system outperforms the content-based recommender system in Information Sufficiency. This evaluation provides further insights into climbing crags recommender system development.