Comparison of system with design criteria



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Comparison of system with design criteria

This architecture meets the goals set out in the design criteria section. The vote servers keep the vote information in a separate stream from the news articles so that system administrators do not have to modify their current news servers. By placing a vote server local to every participating site and providing a means for them to exchange information between themselves, there is no one central vote server authority. Since votes are stored separately from the articles, there is no change made to any article. Any user who wants to see all the articles posted to a newsgroup in their original form can do so by simply ignoring the votes, so there is no issue of censorship. The API provides an interface between the collaborative system and the news reader program, so modifying existing news readers to use collaborative filtering should be easy (this is discussed further in chapter 5). Integrating collaborative filtering into existing news reader programs will both prevent users from having to learn a new user interface, and allow news readers to use the collaborative filtering data in whatever way the program's user interface supports best. Users can vote in either an identified or anonymous fashion, and control who has access to their opinions. Most importantly, the space and bandwidth requirements for the system are very low due to the summary nature of much of the data.

In the next chapter we will present data from the use of the system, notes on our implementation of the client news readers, and finally conclusions we have drawn from this project.

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Next: Results and Conclusions Up: Design Architecture Previous: Maintenance mechanisms



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