13 September 2004
Developing a Recommendation Engine
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Programming .
I am currently heading down the road of researching Recommendation Engines for Xplana. We will be utilizing such a technology in an upcoming product so I have been poking around to do some preliminary R&D.
I am starting with a simple technology called Collaborative Filtering Engines. I found some initial stuff from a group at Oregon State (CoFE) which has proven a little interesting. I am also looking into developing a simple C# plugin for iTunes (via the iTunes COM for Windows SDK) that can serve as a testbed for the R&D on the recommendation engines. I am looking to couple that with the freely available information found at AudioScrobbler which tracks users listening habits.
Another group with some interesting information is the GroupLens site from the University of Minnesota. They have put their research into a publicly available movie database to help recommend movies you might like called MovieLens. The database works incredibly well! I am going to be sure to use it before my next trip to Blockbuster.
I will post code here as I go so that other people may benefit from the research.
