Hypertable Powers Book Abacus -- a Semantic Web-based Book Recommendation Service

[Doug Judd]

Book Abacus (www.bookabacus.com) is a web service that provides book recommendations generated using human-interests gathered from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud.  Azhar (Az) Jassal's case study, Book Abacus, Book Recommendations Using Hypertable and the Linked Open Data Cloud, illustrates how Hypertable enables Book Acabus to mine the LOD cloud and other Web sources to provide book recommendations based on news articles, DBpedia and existing book topics, pricing and availability --  updated every half hour.  The service uses Hypertable on the backend to store and analyze RDF triples, leveraging Hypertable's secondary indexes to allow data to be queried using orthogonal properties. The developers of Book Abacus found that Hypertable secondary indexes provide "a clean native implementation that can be used out-of-the-box."  They also found that while HBase has "numerous implementations" each has "limitations and drawbacks."   The service also exploits Hypertable's atomic counters to maintain incoming and outgoing link counts, which feed its relevance algorithm.  To learn more about Book Abacus and how it utilizes Hypertable, go to Book Abacus, Book Recommendations Using Hypertable and the Linked Open Data Cloud.

Doug