Our research group at the University of Michigan has been working on the "related modules" block for Drupal.org for more than 2 years now. We have published 2 papers on this project so far:
1) Assessment of Conversation Co-mentions as a Resource for Software Module Recommendation. Will be presented at ACM Recommender System Conference'09
2) Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Presented at ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference'08
Thanks to the support of Google Summer of Code'09, I was able to develop the Recommender Bundle for Drupal, which includes the following modules:
http://drupal.org/project/recommender
http://drupal.org/project/history_rec
http://drupal.org/project/fivestar_rec
http://drupal.org/project/voting_rec
http://drupal.org/project/uc_rec
http://drupal.org/project/similargroups
http://drupal.org/project/media_rec (not developed)
This paper is submitted to ACM Recommender System Conference'09, co-authored with my advisor Prof. Paul Resnick.
ABSTRACT
My Google Summer of Code 2009 proposal was accepted. The basic idea is to develop at least three modules based on Recommender API. For example, one module is to recommend Flash videos based on users' viewing history like in YouTube. A mockup screenshot is like this:
For more details and discussion, please go to http://groups.drupal.org/node/19894.
There's a big demand from the Drupal community to add fivestar-like ratings to the contrib modules. This would be a pretty cool feature, but it has other concerns too.
A brief history to begin with ...
The idea is to generate "related modules" recommendation based on co-citations. Suppose we have TinyMCE and FCKeditor co-mentioned together in many forum discussions, then we consider the 2 modules related to some extend. Here is a detailed explanation.
From the experience of developing the "pivots" Drupal module recommendation system, I developed the general purpose Recommender API module. It was released today.
Previously, 'related modules' were generated based on discussions in d.o. forum -- if several modules were mentioned in the same discussion threads, we consider them to be somewhat related. (More detailed explanation of the algorithms can be found in my previous Planet Drupal blogs).
