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[:id])
  @similar_articles = Similus.similar_to(@article)
end

end

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:

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.

Install Redis 2.0 from [code.google.com/p/redis/]
Install the redis gem

gem install redis
Install the Similus gem

gem install similus

License

See LICENSES for details.