The main component of the application is the GroupLens Recommendation Engine, which runs on Windows NT 4.0 and Solaris. The product interacts with the Web server via API integration with Web applications and, because it supports several languages, will work with most Web servers. It has native SQL Server and Oracle support and also supports database connections via Open Database Connectivity. Installing GroupLens was easy, and, under Windows NT, the GroupLens Environment Administrator allowed us to manage basic configuration settings, such as server and database connections. This was also where we created GroupLens partitions.
Partitions are essentially broad category areas where ratings are gathered.
In a bookstore, for example, common partitions might be science fiction, mystery and romance. To track user preference in reviews, we created partitions for Internet, hardware and database reviews. From the Environment Administrator, we could also set the rating level at which the program will recommend an item. The rest of the process of building a GroupLens-enabled commerce site consists of building the API into Web applications and selecting proper prediction methods. Under GroupLens, prediction is handled by algorithms.