Users ratings for package recommendation

[Michael Vogt]

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).
 
> 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. 

Cheers,
 Michael