Hi,
I am a 3rd year undergraduate student of computer science, pursuing my B.Tech degree at RCC Institute of Information Technology. I am proficient in Java, PHP and C#.
Among the project ideas on the GSoC 2013 ideas page, the one particular idea that seemed really interesting to me is developing an Entity Suggester for Wikidata. I want to work on it.
I am passionate about data mining, big data and recommendation engines, therefore this idea naturally appeals to me a lot. I have experience with building music and people recommendation systems, and have worked with Myrrix and Apache Mahout. I recently designed and implemented such a recommendation system and deployed it on a live production site, where I'm interning at, to recommend Facebook users to each other depending upon their interests.
The problem is, the documentation for Wikidata and the Wikibase extension seems pretty daunting to me since I have not ever configured a mediawiki instance or actually used it. (I am on my way to try it out following the instructions at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013#Where_to_start.) I can easily build a recommendation system and create a web-service or REST based API through which the engine can be trained with existing data, and queried and all. This seems to be a collaborative filtering problem (people who bought x also bought y). It'll be easier if I could get some help about the part where/how I need to integrate it with Wikidata. Also, some sample datasets (csv files?) or schemas (just the column names and data types?) would help a lot, for me to figure this out.
I have added this email as a comment on the bug report at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46555#c1.
Please ask me if you have any questions. :-)
Thanks, Nilesh