[Koha-devel] Re: [Koha] schema question

[Pat Eyler]

Stuart,
I'm forwarding your message to the development list where it stands a
better chance of being answered.  If you're interested in implementing
functionality such as this, you may want to subscribe to the development
list.

thanks,
-pate

On Mon, 13 May 2002, <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> Hello
>
> I've got a couple of quick questions about the Koha database schema. I think 
> I've worked it out, but just want to double check. I'm working from the CVS 
> version and data.
>
> I'm interested in implementing a collaborative recommendation feature which 
> allowed users to see which books other people who borrowed the current book 
> had also borrowed. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble use a similar feature.
>
> In English the query I want is "Which books have been lent to the most people 
> who have also borrowed the current book?" With the restriction that the books 
> I recommend must be available for lending from the current library (it's 
> pointless recommending a book that's not there) and must have more than N 
> borrowers in common with the current book (to protect the privacy of 
> borrowers, N is set to 5 or 10).
>
> Logically what I want to do is a join across biblio--> items--> issues--> 
> borrowernumber--> issues--> items--> biblio with SELECT, a COUNT and a SORT. 
> This, of course, gives huge intermediate tables, so I'd have to do several 
> SELECTs as I go.
>
> I may also need to factor in a component of "how much has book A been 
> borrowed by borrowers of book B compared to all other borrowers" to prevent 
> very popular items (think Harry Potter) being recommended for every possible 
> book. This effect would be similar to tf-idf ranking from classical 
> information retrieval.
>
> My questions are:
> (1) How do I tell whether a book is 'available'? I think I need to check the 
> items table and make sure that stack, notforloan, itemlost and wthdrawn are 
> all zero does this sounds right?.
> (2) I don't understand the distinction between items and biblioitems
> (3) How to I differentiate between children's and adult's books, between 
> fiction and non-fiction?
> (4) Would collaborative recommendation be useful in a small library catalog?
> (5) Would the small incursion of user privacy be acceptable in a small public 
> library?
>
> thanks for your help
> stuart
>
>
>
>
> --    stuart yeates <address@hidden> aka `loam'
>   "To err is human--but it feels divine."  --  Mae West
> X-no-archive:yes
>
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