Similus

Similus is a Ruby library that allows to find similar objects and recommendations using generated activity. Examples of usage:

• Find similar articles based on what other users also viewed.

• Recommend articles to users based on their activity.

Authors

Horaci Cuevas <horaci@gmail.com>

Quick overview

• Setup

• Store activity

• Show similar objects

• Show recommended objects

Setup

Before using Similus, you need to setup the redis configuration. In rails this can be done inside a preinitializer in the config/preinitializers folder.

Similus.configdo|config|config.backend = :redisconfig.redis_server = "localhost:6379"config.redis_db = 8end

Store activity

Locate where you want to store activity. For example, in Ruby on Rails, inside the show method of the ArticlesController class:

classArticlesController<ApplicationControllerdefshow@article = Article.find(params[:id])
Similus.add_activity(current_user, :show, @article)
endend

Show similar objects

Once there is some activity stored by users, you can query for similar objects:

classArticlesController<ApplicationControllerdefshow@article = Article.find(params[:id])
@similar_articles = Similus.similar_to(@article)
endend

Show recommended objects

Even better than just showing similar articles, show recommended articles for the user’s previous activity when there is a logged in user:

classHomeController<ApplicationControllerdefindex@recommended_articles = Similus.recommended_for(current_user)
endend

Configuring and installing Similus

As of current version, Similus only supports redis backend.

Install Redis 2.0 from [code.google.com/p/redis/] and start the server.

Install the Similus gem:

geminstallsimilus

License

Copyright © 2010 Horaci Cuevas

See LICENSES for details.