Recommended Systems ???

[Praveen2710]

Hi,
My professor has asked me to work on recommended systems. I have no idea what it is and so I asked my professor to explain in a little more detail.

The reply he has given is such.Many applications require the use on non traditional database like for example travel agent database. A travel agent can book flight,car, hotel in a given time period with best possible combination.This cannot be done with a simple SQL query. I need to figure out how does a travel agent go through 1000's of record from each table, choose the best from each, combine them and give us a selection of a few(ranging from 1-10) best selection of combination.

I would like to find material to read on that and as far as I have gone in GDS(general distribution system) like Sabre, appolo. How they work is my question. I would like to know your view and any suggestion for reading material and also any specific part I can work on this topic for my term project(CAn be a paper or a practical work).:banghead:

Thanks for reading such a long post and helping me in advance

 

[ButtonMoon]

They are called "Recommendation Systems" or "Recommender Systems".

A search of an academic index like CiteSeer or the ACM digital library will find thousands of references for you.

Here's one:
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds/ch9.pdf

 

[Praveen2710]

Hi,
THanks a lot for the reply. I will definitely go through that. I wanted to know can we build a small recommended systems on our own or is it too much effort.
If we can build can you refer some software to learn to build a small recommend system
(or)
Some stream in it on which we can research and improve maybe.

 

[Rx_]

A long time friend of mine just retired from United Reservation System.
It is a combination of SQL Server and several other large database arrays.
Estimate that it consist of around 8,000 IT staff.

Anyone can build an interface, but a "system" is very complex.
Just the version release management and Quality Assurance groups alone can be massive.
Another friend left Carnival Ship. An example of replacing qualified systems DBA and Query developers with staff from India. They saw everything deteriorate and left. The queries for reservations that use to take mili-seconds began to take 20 to 50 seconds. The level of understanding how a query runs over an entire system (Performance Tuning) lead to their company having a huge downturn in reservations. The new Harvard Management considers a warm-body at the lowest pay to somehow be profitable.
But, since it is academic and not necessarily real-world, suggest searching the word "Case Study". Gartner is a major research for IT in this area.
http://www.evolven.com/blog/downtime-outages-and-failures-understanding-their-true-costs.html
Here is a horror story from Virgin Blue Travel - a small system. In real engineering projects, learning from failures comes first. However, IT is not actually engineering in the true meaning of the word.

 

[Praveen2710]

huh?
Was the above reply related to my question. I am sorry If I could not relate this to my question