Design Architecture



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Design Architecture

Since our goal was to develop a robust, scalable system that would interoperate well with Net News, it is not surprising that our system design parallels that of the Net News system in many ways. The fundamental object on which the system operates is called a vote. Each vote represents a single user's evaluation of a single article. The architecture for processing votes is shown in figure gif and it is broken up into two main pieces.

  
Figure: Block diagram of the collaborative filtering architecture.

The first piece is the interface module. This interface stands between the news reader programs and the collaborative system. The interface sends votes off into the collaborative system and answers requests from the news reader for information about the popularity of an article. The interface obtains information about the popularity of an article by consulting various vote sources which hold collections of previous users' votes.

The second piece of the architecture is the vote server. The vote server acts as a vote source and is responsible for maintaining a vote database which contains the aggregated votes of all Usenet. The vote server incorporates votes from its own site and other sites into its database, and exchanges the votes cast by local users with the vote servers at other sites. The remaining sections of this chapter will describe each of these parts in more detail, and conclude by comparing the architectural goals we set out previously with the design described here.





next up previous contents
Next: Votes Up: CDistributing Info for Collaborative Previous: Where are we?



David A. Maltz (dmaltz@cs.cmu.edu)