Hi, My name is António Lemos and I’m from Portugal.
I’m now answering a RFP for a web portal development and I’m specially focused on the recommendation part. I’m completely new to recommendation and collaborative filtering solutions but from what I was able to understand Apache Mahout seems to address my requirements. First things first, from what I understood, Mahout is a learning machine available as a scalable library that does (among other things) classifications and collaborative filtering (CF) assured by Taste that accomplish both item-based and user-based recommendations. My first question is basically, if Mahout can be executed in real-time or as a batch process? Now, from the RFP requirements, the portal should be able to produce and manage recommendations, namely: - Produce recommendations based on explicit rules or explicit profile data; - Create profiles based on user browsing and use that information in suggestion rules (e.g. If a specific user reads articles about Alex Ferguson I can infer that he is a Manchester United supporter and thus the recommendation engine will recommend articles related to Man. Utd.); - Produce recommendations based on content views or research; - Collaborative filtering capabilities and real-time analytic models; Do you know if Mahout addresses all these requirements? I’m searching for articles related to Mahout integration (in https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/MahoutIntegration this section is blank) namely integration with the WCM we are going to propose (EZ Publish) but I was not able to find anything, do you have any insights about how does Mahout integrates with WCM solutions? My last doubt, - I think is probably related to the previous one, - is basically a question about Mahout integration with user session logging. Let’s say an anonymous user browses article A1 and A2 and rates item I1 and I2, at this point the recommendation engine should be able to produce some recommendation for related articles and items (explicit or not). What happens to the user preferences when anonymous user decides to login in the website? Are they included in the data model and thus related to that user or they are lost? Regards, António Lemos
