Deploy module recommendations based on content in page, and recommend modules on module project pages

Paul Resnick and I began discussing adding recommendations at WineCamp in May 2006. Paul is professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. Since January of 2007, Angie, Gerhard, Derek, and I have been working with Paul and his graduate student Danielle Zhou, as well as Michael Hess to implement module recommendations. We are now getting ready to go live.

In the "State of Drupal 2007" survey we learned what the biggest improvements to Drupal.org the community wanted.

Question 9: What would Drupal.org benefit from:
A way to differentiate modules by quality/popularity: 60%
Rating and/or reviews of contributed themes and modules: 36%

Rather than straight popularity voting of modules, which is often flawed we are planning to deploy "pivots and double pivots" to make recommendations.

Here is the schedule for completion:
1) We hope to have the pivots module available for Drupal.org with an off-line computation and some feedback.
Target for deployment: early December
2) A more powerful java program will be made available to do batch processing on tables: Target for deployment: early December
3) A new pivot will be developed to make recommendations based on how modules are used in combinations: Target for deployment early next year.

We will prototype on one our design sites or scratch. If things go well we should have a great context module recommendation system shortly.

To learn more about this module recommendations system:
http://drupal.org/project/pivots for the module
http://pivots.cms.si.umich.edu/ for a demo.
http://drupal.cms5.si.umich.edu/project/panels <-- double pivot block is currently disabled.

Kieran