Template:GettingStarted
[[Image:{{{1}}}.png]]
Directed Edge makes integrating with our recommendations engine easy with {{{1}}}. We provide bindings that handle all of the communication with our server transparently using normal {{{1}}} objects.
Getting started
- Introduction to Recommendations explain some basic concepts like how recommendations work and how they can be used in e-commerce or social applications. It's a good starting point if you're wondering how recommendations work or what they're useful for.
- API Concepts explains some of the basics of hour our API works and introduces the concepts of items, tags and links, also explained briefly below.
- Grab the {{{1}}} bindings from GitHub and copy the file named {{{2}}} into your project.
Data modeling
Items and links
To model the data from your site, you'll need to figure out what your items are. Usually they're things like users, products and articles. We represent a relationship between items by links. So, if you have Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" that you want to say was bought by "John Doe", you create a link from "John Doe" to "Blonde on Blonde".
Identifiers
Usually we don't need to actually know the names of those items — they just need a unique identifier. Typically that's something like customer1 and product1. Most people just use the ID field from their own database. So if you have a MySQL table named products and Blonde on Blonde is at the row with ID 42 then you'd just use product42 as your identifier for that product.
Tags
Items also have tags, so John Doe would probably have a user tag and Blonde on Blonde would have a product tag. Tags don't weigh into the ranking at all — they're just used so that you can filter the sort of results you'd like to get. So if you want to show related products, you'd run a query looking for things with the tag product.
