Guidance Needed

[siobhyb]

Hi all,

 

I have created a web application where users are able to create "rooms" of content.

 

When a user views a room, I want to give recommendations for related rooms but am unsure of how to go about doing this.  All the information for the rooms are stored in a database.

 

Are there third party libraries or tutorials that would help me in doing this?

 

Any advice would be really appreciated.

 

Many thanks. X

[thehippy]

This ends up being a tricky behaviour to create, but if you specifically define the nature of the relationships of what you wish to recommend it becomes easier.  If for example you wish to recommend 'rooms' that are similar, define what makes them similar, is it words, the nature of the content, some meta data or metric?

 

I think a simple solution is to give users the ability to add keywords or tags, or else generate keywords yourself from user content.  Then list the results however you wish to use them.

 

You could also use keywords to calculate a relevancy score, calculating how many keywords one room shares with another for example.

 

There are other far more complex solutions for understanding and creating relationships involving mathematical networks if you wish to search out those on your own.  Understanding how indexes score results may help you out as well, if I remember Apache Lucene's documentation has some info that may be relevant.