To kind of wrap this up for now -- I hear some consensus that Mahout is about distributed, Hadoop-based solutions for developers. So let's make sure we present a clean, coherent API to developers wanting to run the project's Hadoop jobs.
I think we're a little bit stuck now as Hadoop 0.20.0 is a little bit busted. But as it moves forward, perhaps I can volunteer to suggest changes to unify the various jobs, mappers, reducers, etc. across the project. Sean On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:21 PM, Grant Ingersoll<gsing...@apache.org> wrote: > > On Sep 4, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Ted Dunning wrote: > >> These are good questions to ask. I don't know that we are ready to answer >> them, but I do think that we have pieces of the answers. >> >> So far, there are three or four general themes that seem to be of real >> interest/value >> >> a) taste/collaborative filtering/cooccurrence analysis >> >> b) facilitation of conventional machine learning by large scale >> aggregation >> using hadoop (so far, this is largely cooccurrence counting) >> >> c) standard and basic machine learning tasks like clustering, simple >> classifiers running on large scale data >> >> d) stuff > > I'd add a few non-technical things I find useful: > > e) Non-viral License > > f) Community supporting it (i.e. not abandoned) and a place to get answers > about practical problems. > > I've been frustrated more than once by the lack of (e) and (f) on some other > projects. Not that I'm saying we solve (f) yet completely (could use a bit > more diversity in people answering, but that is starting to take hold, too), > but I do firmly believe Apache is one of the best places to build a > community. > > -Grant >
