Users ratings for package recommendation

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 10.02.2011, at 18:17, Michael Vogt wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 12:54:27PM -0200, Tássia Camões wrote:
>> Hello all,
> Hallo!
> 
>> I'm following the posts after the Cross-distro Meeting but I didn't
>> notice any comment about how users comments and ratings will be
>> implemented. Is it too early to think about that? I see it was
>> considered in the architecture [1].
> 
> The plan we came up during the meeting was to use OCS for the
> ratings&reviews. Independently of this, there is a "rnr-server"
> implementation for ubuntu available (and used by software-center). It
> should be pretty simple to add the needed code to s-c to talk to OCS
> (and I would really like to see the rnr-server provide a OCS
> compatible API for this).

Yes. This would be good. I think it is important for the success of this initiative that we all use the same API and most people seams to agree to use OCS for this.


> 
>> I've been studying different recommendations techniques, initially
>> planning to develop a Debian package recommender that could be
>> attached to a package management system. However with the recent
>> cross-distro effort, I'd be happy to work on a platform independent
>> solution, so that it could be attached to appInstaller. Matching
>> packages names across distros would be the first pre-requisite for
>> that and it seems we already have an initial solution for it.
>> 
>> On the Debian side, I'm planning to use mainly apt-xapian-index,
>> debtags, popcon and UDD as data sources. At least some of these could
>> be extended to other distros, as Enrico presented at his recent posts
>> [2] [3].
> 
> I think its great that you plan to work on this! Its a really cool
> feature.
> 
> Another interessting datasource is probably zeitgeist as it will keep
> track of e.g. what files the user has worked with (you may want to
> look at the sofware-center code to see how its used there). I think
> ratings&reviews are more interessting than popcon. Popcon favours
> default installed apps and also there is a certain self selection
> (will only show data for people who enable it who are most likely
> technical). One hope is that ratings&reviews are less so (hard to say
> as we don't have that much experience with them yet).
> 
>> At this point, the available information for collaborative techniques
>> is the list of packages users have installed on their systems [4], so
>> I'll work with that. But if the plan is to have a server to collect
>> user ratings, it should be considered to produce better
>> recommendations.
>> 
>> I've drafted a wiki page with some ideas about the recommendation strategies:
>> https://github.com/tassia/AppRecommender/wiki
>> 
>> Is there anyone interested in talking about this topics?
> 
> I'm definitely interessted. I would love to see a approach that takes
> the users mimetypes/apps (zeitgeist, popcon) and server ratings into
> account. 


There is an OCS call to fetch successions from the server. The benefit of doing this is that you can include data from other users or your friends in this recommendation.
I think it would be a good idea to combine remote/social data and local data here.


Cheers
Frank


--
Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org