Drupal Taxonomy + Heavy Modification = Preference Engine? Thoughts?

Looks like this will be the second time I post in this category before a response, this could potentially go in the programming or web design categories but since I plan to modify Drupals taxonomy module for this Im looking for readers/commenters familiar with Drupal (unless another CMS would be better).

Im working on building my site and have the intention of designing a prefference engine for my visitors, based off the visitors history and off of user generated preference data I would like to have an engine that will present the viewer with content of interest to them. Always a hard thing to do but with the help of the Taxonomy module I have some ideas. (Looking for more).

Since you can already link terms vertically and horizontally the only thing I can think to add would be values to the terms. For example an article could be a 7 on the news scale (from 1-10 so a person VERY interested in news would perhaps find it a little weak but a person not at all interested in news would find it too much. (Make sense?)

This would be easy to impliment with another database entry to hold the value of the term both for user preferences and for values associated to the content it links too.

The idea being as a user goes on the values will adjust as well as new terms being added or removed from the preferences array.

Also I want to develop an automatic 'crawler' of sorts that will take in aggregator info or search it out itself and classify it using the taxonomy data. The database would be pretty big but im not worried about that right now.

What do you guys think? There is a little more detail to go over but im at work right now and am running out of time. I will add more when I get a chance...

-Jordan

 

 

 

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This doesn't sound like a bad idea. Since Drupal 5.x reintroduced support for PostgreSQL I'd seriously take a look at that database over MySQL as a lot of this could be done with in the database, just not the client scripts.

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Well I do not have much experience with Drupal, so I cannot help you much in the line of that.

However, if I understand your idea correctly, it sound like a great idea. If I am understanding this, it is like a website where you get 'news' based on what you like, and this is based on you rating news items or something somehow?

As for crawling data, why bother with that? Can't you try and get rss feeds from tons of different sites, and use them to get the information?

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unimatrix: Thank you for suggesting postgreSQL, after looking into it I like how the database can do alot of the work. Im trying to get it installed with 5.1 but am having problems (something about php.ini, had this problem?)

Brian: Youve got it pretty much right, I want active rating as well as passive rating, length of time article is viewed. If links were clicked could all be factored in. At first I will just use aggregator for content but perhaps down the road something could analyze video and audio content

Can anyone help with the Drupal + PostgreSQL issue?

-Jordan

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