Geo-labelled data is increasingly available. This benefits from advanced hardware (positioning systems, mobile networks), software (standards, tools, mobile services), and the ever-growing mentality of sharing (crowdsourcing for geographic tagging). Many daily web application services (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare) generate data and traces that are often transparently annotated with location and contextual information. The rich and diverse information discovered from geo-labelled data leads to improvements in location-aware mobile computing with big data frameworks, network analytical modelling, route prediction and recommender systems.

However, the evolution towards location-aware tasks in mobile computing environments is still in its early days. Much of the promised benefits require further research and development. The main challenges include the combination of geo-labelled information with ideas and techniques from various research communities (e.g., recommender systems, data management, geographic information systems, social network analytics and text mining). How to make location-aware solutions complement mobile wireless communication systems is an important challenge.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collect original research articles and review articles sharing recent advances and future trends of location-aware services and mobile social networks. We hope that this Special Issue also brings together academic researchers and industry developers.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Recommendations for locations, events, venues, travel
• Friend/social group/community suggestions and discovery
• Extracting preferences, tips, ratings, patterns and habits
• Modelling geo-social influence of users and locations
• Location-aware viral campaigns, location prediction and location privacy
• Proximity marketing over social networks
• Historical geographical information systems
• Spatial-temporal social network analysis
• Text geo-parsing and other NLP techniques for geographical text analysis
• Automatic guide and tour generation for social networks
• Exhibition arrangement, hot spots, significant places and interesting locations detection
• Location using the context recommendation system
• Collaborative filtering vs. content-based recommendation system
• User preference/mobility modelling and analysis
• User similarity computing based on locations