Driven by technological advances in hardware (positioning systems, environmental sensors), software (standards, tools, network services), and aided by various open movements (open, linked, government data) and the ever-growing mentality of sharing for the greater good (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, collaborative and volunteered geographic information), the amount of available geo-referenced data has seen dramatic explosion over the past few years. Human activities generate data and traces that are now often transparently annotated with location and contextual information. At the same time, it has become easier than ever to collect and combine rich and diverse information about locations. Exploiting this torrent of geo-referenced data provides a tremendous potential to materially improve existing and offer novel types of recommendation services, with clear benefits in many domains, including social networks, marketing, and tourism.

Fully exploiting this potential requires addressing many core challenges and combining ideas and techniques from various research communities, such as recommender systems, data management, geographic information systems, social network analytics, text mining. Bringing together researchers and practitioners from these communities, the aim of this workshop is to provide a unique forum for discussing in depth and collecting feedback about challenges, opportunities, novel techniques and applications. LocalRec is about making recommendations in which location plays a key role, either as part of the recommended object, or as part of the recommendation process.