Evaluating the Time Dimension for Cultural Separation Using Food Habits

In this study we evaluate a methodology for identifying cultural boundaries, which explores users' drink and food preferences extracted from the Social Web. We focus mainly on the better understanding of the importance of the time dimension on that methodology. Our results indicate that, in fact, take the time dimension into account helps to increase the precision of the results. Automatic identification of cultural differences might be useful to complement large-scale studies on cultural differences, process that can be costly using traditional methods, such as questionnaires. Besides that, it can help the development of new ubiquitous applications and services for the Social Web.