Similus

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

  • Find similar articles to another one based on what other users also viewed.
  • Recommend articles to a user based on similar activity of other users.

Authors

Horaci Cuevas [email protected]

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.config do |config|
config.backend = :redis
config.redis_server = "localhost:6379"
config.redis_db = 8
end

Store activity

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

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
def show
  @article = Article.find(params[:id])
  Similus.add_activity(current_user, :show, @article)
end
end

Show similar objects

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

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController def show @article = Article.find(params) @similar_articles = Similus.similar_to(@article) end end

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

class HomeController < ApplicationController def index @recommended_articles = Similus.recommended_for(current_user, :target => "Article") end end

Configuring and installing Similus

As of current version, Similus only supports redis backend. Thus, you need the redis gem and a redis server started.

License

Copyright (c) 2010 Horaci Cuevas

See LICENSES for details.