Shortest Path Calculation: A Comparative Study for Location-Based Recommender System

Finding the shortest path between two points on Earth is important especially in navigation. Since the Earth does not exactly follow one of the geometric shapes, calculating the distance on its surface is one of the important challenges. Haversine and Vincenty formulas are the two major formulas used for calculating distances on a sphere and elliptic shapes, respectively. Since the Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor ellipse, using these formulas gives approximate results about the real distances. This paper presents and evaluates the two formulas by applying them on location -- based context-aware recommender system. As a result, the paper concludes that Haversine is more appropriate in the field of recommendation.