

Show HN: Pick a movie you like and discover others  semantically - mhuffman
http://movies.ootu.com

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lambtron
This is cool. Movie recommendations are not easy, since there are just too
many dimensions with which to compare movies. Sometimes there is just no
better movie recommendation than just having a friend who knows your tastes.

Here is another site that has proven some worthy suggestions for me in the
past. [http://www.nanocrowd.com/](http://www.nanocrowd.com/)

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mhuffman
We have a broader semantic navigation technology that is driving this site.
Shortly we will be doing apps for books, video games, and business.

We think that why movie recommendations are so hard is because people might
like the same movie for different reasons. For example, if I told two friends
that I liked the movie "Titanic", and asked for a recommendation they might
separately recommend "The Perfect Storm" and "Avatar". Two very different
movies, but both would count as good recommendations for different reasons.
The problem, is that when a person recommends a movie to you, they have
already filtered it according to what they thought was interesting about the
movie.

Having said that it is still the best way to discover new movies. We believe
that easy to use semantic browsing is a good middle-ground for any information
discovery.

nanocrowd is very cool. I have not heard of the company before, but they have
a very interesting take.

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lobster_johnson
What's the source dataset? IMDb?

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mhuffman
No we are using open semantic data sources to start. Soon movie lovers will be
able to add their own data to the ontology.

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lobster_johnson
Open semantic data sources? That's very vague. :) Freebase?

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mhuffman
Freebase, wikipedia, yago, wordnet, and some others. Nearly all hand-curated.

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lobster_johnson
YAGO looks interesting -- and it seems to encapsulate both Freebase and
Wikipedia. Does this mean you're using YAGO to get to Freebase/Wikipedia?

~~~
mhuffman
No. YAGO is actually a curated subset of those.

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pskittle
Do you'll do TV shows too?

~~~
mhuffman
Right now just movies, but if there is interest TV shows would not be a
problem. The underlying technology can work with most semantically related
data sources.

