Towards creating a non-synthetic group recommendation dataset

Recommender systems can be useful in group settings, e.g. when choosing a movie to watch with a group. However, while considerable research in group recommendation has been performed, we still lack truly ecological datasets on group recommendations in real life consumption scenarios. Much of the existing work considers hypothetical consumption scenarios, and commonly, individual ratings are aggregated, but no actual group consumption takes place in which situational differences per group are taken into account. In this paper, we outline a vision for acquiring more realistic and ecological group consumption data, based on a crowdsourcing application that will acquire individual ratings per group consumption event. We discuss various design decisions that will allow us to gather these ratings effectively from a large group of people, and demonstrate and evaluate the viability of our approach towards reaching group consensus through rating session simulations.