Josep Lluís Larriba, UPC professor and CEO of the Sparsity Technologies company, talks about the technology Sparksee, the world’s only mobile and embedded graph database, used in Diskover.
This technology plays an important role in the recommendation of points of interest made by the app, providing a knowledge base of the individual on the mobile device.
A graph-oriented database represents entities (people, points of interest, etc.) as nodes of a graph and their relationships as edges of that graph (visited a point of interest, made a “like” to the point of interest, etc.). A graph database allows calculations to be made on the data using the relationships between entities and graph-oriented algorithms (search for communities, patterns, relevance). In addition, Sparksee technology allows you to extract relevant information by using attributes on nodes and edges, which we call tags.
How does this technology work within Diskover?
Each point of interest (places, experiences, etc.) in Diskover is associated with words that describe it (what we call labels, for example, monument, architecture, gastronomy) and form a graph. What Sparksee does is learn from the user’s tastes by visiting or interacting with each point of interest, accumulating history of what the person using the app has done.
The goal is for the mobile phone to constantly have a ranking of the things the user likes using graph-relevant search algorithms. When the server receives the tags sorted by what the user likes best, it responds with a set of points of interest sorted by the order that the algorithms have given to the tags.
Each time the user opens the Diskover app, it sends a request to the server with a set of sorted tags based on the calculation made on the mobile device, and the server sends back the points that the mobile will show, determined by what the user likes.
The only graphical database in the world for mobile and embedded devices, used in Diskover
Sparsity’s technology comes from the DAMA-UPC research group at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, which specializes in data management. Its mission is to keep us up to date with the latest innovations and knowledge from one of the best universities in Computer Science and Engineering.
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