Due to the emerging Big Data paradigm, driven by the increasing availability of intelligent services easily accessible by a large number of users (e.g., social networks), traditional data management techniques are inadequate in many real-life scenarios. In particular, the availability of huge amounts of data pertaining to user social interactions, user preferences, and opinions calls for advanced analysis strategies to understand potentially interesting social dynamics. Furthermore, heterogeneity and high speed of user-generated data require suitable data storage and management tools to be designed from scratch. This article presents a framework tailored for analyzing user interactions with intelligent systems while seeking some domain-specific information (e.g., choosing a good restaurant in a visited area). The framework enhances a user's quest for information by exploiting previous knowledge about their social environment, the extent of influence the users are potentially subject to, and the influence they may exert on other users. User influence spread across the network is dynamically computed as well to improve user search strategy by providing specific suggestions, represented as tailored faceted features. Such features are the result of data exchange activity (called data posting) that enriches information sources with additional background information and knowledge derived from experiences and behavioral properties of domain experts and users. The approach is tested in an important application scenario such as tourist recommendation, but it can be profitably exploited in several other contexts, for example, viral marketing and food education.
The pervasive diffusion of new generation devices like smart phones and tablets along with the widespread use of social networks causes the generation of massive data flows containing heterogeneous information generated at different rates and having different formats. These data are referred as Big Data and require new storage and analysis approaches to be investigated for managing them. In this paper we will describe a system for dealing with massive tourism flows that we exploited for the analysis of tourist behavior in Italy. We defined a framework that exploits a NoSQL approach for data management and map reduce for improving the analysis of the data gathered from different sources.
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