TITLE: Which Riemannian manifolds admit a finite dimensional transitive Lie group action?
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: This is a basically an adjusted version of my earlier question about how to define a convolution algebra on a general Riemannian manifold.  The motivation for asking such a question of course comes from the observation that if G is a group and X is a manifold and the action of G on X is transitive, then the pullback from each point in X to its orbit is faithful.  This then cuts out an ideal in the convolution algebra on G which would (hopefully) correspond to some type of general convolution on X (and that would be pretty handy to have for many obvious reasons).
My intuition is that for 2D surfaces (which is the case I am most interested in right now), the group is going to be something like $PSL(2) / \pi(X)$ with the action obtained by the pushforward of the action of $PSL(2)$ on $RP^2$ by the universal covering of $RP^2 / \pi(X)$.  Of course, trying to work all of this out via quotient relations is an enormous pain in the neck, so it would be nice to maybe avoid some headaches and instead try to find maybe some standard references for this sort of thing (if they exist at all).

REPLY [7 votes]: I think that one of the nicest results in this direction may be the one in Ambrose and Singer's paper "On homogeneous Riemannian manifolds". They give a local NASC for a complete Riemannian manifold to be homogeneous. There is a follow-up book by Tricerri and van Hecke called Homogeneous structures on Riemannian manifolds.