Help with user matching algorithm?

[dajohnson1s]

Hello,

 

This is my first posting, and apologize if I have missed any posting protocols. 

 

I have been given a project that would allow students and alumni to do a 'mentoring' program.  Unfortunately, this project has been launched already, and we have gotten an overwhelming request for the program.

 

I am having a little trouble understanding/deciding how to develop an algorithm to 'rank' attributes for the students and match them with the list of alumni (and vice versa) and greatly need some input.  What I have gathered thus far for requirements are:

 

Students

[*]Geographical location

[*]Major

[*]Interests

Alumni/Mentor

[*]Geographical Location

[*]Profession

[*]Year in Profession

[*]Major

[*]Interest

 

Specifically, I am a little confuse how to compute an Alumni with 10 years of experience in "Web Development" but has a burning passion for 'Embedded Systems', or even a hobby, like sky diving.  My goal would be to provide a 'top 10' for both Mentor and Student.  And I greatly need some guidance on this, as a student, I feel if this isn't introduce and function fairly well, it will crash and burn.

 

Daniel

 

 

[sw45acp]

Well, what is your means of data storage for this? If you are using mysql, you could have a separate table for students, and another for alumni/mentors, with each of your descriptions being the column headers. From there, you could extract information and sort based on criteria from that information.

[dajohnson1s]

Yes, I will store the data in mysql. 

 

The only thing I can envision doing is a 'basic' query to show which users have the common attributes.  I thought it would be neat to have something like:

 

John Doe has 86.9% of the same interests

 

But maybe that would be overkill, or inappropriate for a baseline system.  I think for now, I will just do a plain search for people with the same interests, the go from there.

 

I will post back when I have more information, and hopefully something functional.

[scarhand]

then you grab the interests the current person has into an array, use an interests table to link each interest to each persons id, then create a select where in query and compare the total results from that to the total interests of the current person.