Technical Ramblings

I’m not sure if I’ve posted on this before, but I noticed a few new features in the site, so I’m going to mention it again.

FilmTrust is a film rating site, much like the ratings built into NetFlix or other similar services. You rate things you’ve seen, and FilmTrust offers to you suggestions as to what you might want to look into seeing. However, instead of just basing it on what movies you’ve seen and what everyone else thought about those movies, it also uses social connections to make these estimates. You create a “friends” network, and give each of these friends ‘ratings’, which determines how much affect their opinions have on your recommendations.

According to the tour, this calculation is “… calculated using the trust ratings you have for your friends, what they have for their friends, and how those people rated the film.”

One of the cooler aspects of the project is that it is rich with information in RDF. So, you can take the information from the site, and pull it into a local RDF store, and manipulate it ot your heart’s content. If you wanted to do your own suggested ratings system by looking at the reviews that each of your friends have offered, you can do that: you could, indeed, redisplay much of the information available on the site solely by using the RDF information and doing your own calculations. (This would, I’m pretty sure, bring up the issue of copyright, so I wouldn’t recommend it without at least discussing it with the project maintainers first.)

FilmTrust is an academic research project being run by Jennifer Golbeck. More information is available on the About FilmTrust page.

Other people have already written on the topic of FilmTrust: MortenF has some nifty toys based around it, Danny’s post a month ago talked about it, and there’s always the random non-english post when you get any project large enough to get a significant following.

I’d like to see more people joining it, especially people with an interest in good computer related movies, because I need some suggestions. So, join today, and add me as a friend!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 13th, 2005 at 9:57 am and is filed under Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.