Wednesday, April 18, 2007

MapReduce and Cellarspot

As you might know, Cellarspot was created and is maintained/extended by a group of third year University of Washington computer science students (including myself). As you probably didn't know, two of them are in a distributed computing course mostly focused on Hadoop (an open-source, Java-based MapReduce engine). The point of the quarter has come around where we're in need of a final project, and the two of us are trying to find a way to apply MapReduce to Cellarspot (or at least eventually) to provide a cool service to our users.

One idea we thought of was a specialized, wine-based search engine that would crawl stores, groups, clubs, blogs, and anything else we found relevant. Another idea was to create a powerful food and wine pairing recommendation system, but we don't have enough data yet to produce useful recommendations.

I think we'll be able to find a cool way to apply MapReduce to Cellarspot.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Post #1

Welcome!

If you're reading this, cellarspot.com is up and running. We encourage you to poke around and try out our exciting features, and then give us some feedback on what you like, and what you don't like, so that we can fix it as soon as possible!

Thanks!

-The cellarspot.com development team.