Recommender system suggestions

I'm trying to set up on my website a way for municipilaties to answer a survey discussing their current affordable housing programs and, based on their responses, to share recommendations for actions they are not taken from a much larger list of best practices.  It essentially involves:

1. Input - survey responses

2. Logic - based on responses, determining which of our recommendations are relevant

3. Output - for the survey completer, ideally a pdf doc or just a webpage with the recommendations listed

I've done some looking at recommender systems which seem more complex than I need.  The questions in the survey correspond directly with recommendations (i.e. if they are doing this, we won't put it as a best practice recommendation).

Does anyone know of a tool I can look at to easily set one up?  Or is there a better term to describe this type of system than what I am using (recommender system)?

Hi,

I'm sorry but I'm not sure I completely understand what you're asking for here.

What do you mean by "recommender systems"? Are you looking for a survey tool that allows you to post responses to your questions in PDF format?

If you can provide some clarification, that would help.

Thanks,

Yann

Essentially, we have a long document (24 pages) of best practices, but not all will be relevant to a given local government.   What we are looking for is a tool that will allow the government to tell us which of these practices they are implementing (through a survey) and then to provide them a customized recommendation document (4-5 pages) for the ones they are currently doing.  I'm assuming it would be: Input: a survey telling what they are doing; system logic: to extract the recommendations they are not currently implementing for the long list; output: recommendations as a pdf doc provided to them.   It's sort of like TurboTax where you answer a bunch of questions and based on your answers, they recommend deductions you can take on your taxes.

michaelexp:

Essentially, we have a long document (24 pages) of best practices, but not all will be relevant to a given local government.   What we are looking for is a tool that will allow the government to tell us which of these practices they are implementing (through a survey) and then to provide them a customized recommendation document (4-5 pages) for the ones they are currently doing.  I'm assuming it would be: Input: a survey telling what they are doing; system logic: to extract the recommendations they are not currently implementing for the long list; output: recommendations as a pdf doc provided to them.   It's sort of like TurboTax where you answer a bunch of questions and based on your answers, they recommend deductions you can take on your taxes.

 

 

 

Ah, I get it.  So basically what you're looking to create is a kind of tool (something like what I would call a "Best Practices Advisor Tool") that would generate a customized PDF report which outlines specific tailored recommendations for each local government, based on their responses to your survey.  So, in other words, depending on the best practices that a given government is doing, this tool (using logic) would then figure out which of these practices they are not doing, and would, in turn, recommend these in the PDF report.

Yann

Exactly.  Any ideas of products that exist like this and can be used by a non-coder/programmer?

It reminds me of an application I wrote over 20 years ago (in DataPerfect/DOS) for a dermatologist, to speed up the creation of reports. 

It seems that the profession has a huge list of standard boilerplate sentences to describe symptoms, diagnoses and recommended treatments.

I created a front-end that allowed him to enter abbreviations and make some quick choices, and the application then printed out pages and pages of reports, letters to referring doctors and insurance companies, etc, providing only the pertinent information.

The database structure was pretty simple. (a single table and a few text fields - could probably have been adapted to an .ini file) So if you can't find a pre-written application that meets your needs, you might want to look for a database developer who can build it for you at a reasonable cost.

-ENO

The company I work with built something quite like this in Drupal just recently--it was built with almost no custom code.  Depending on your final needs, it seems to me that you could build something that could work quite nicely with core and contributed modules - no coding required.

I haven't used Drupal before.  Is what you built something that is publicly visible?  I would love to see what the final product to help figure out if this is a direction I should explore.

I'm not sure if has been pushed live yet but I'll looked into it on Monday.

This hasn't been pushed live yet.  I'll post back when it is so you can take a look.