MovieLens is a recommender system and virtual community

Virtual community

A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...

 website that recommends films for its users to watch, based on their film preferences and using collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets...

. The website is a project of GroupLens Research

GroupLens Research

GroupLens Research is a research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems, online communities, mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.The...

, a research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

 which created MovieLens in 1997. The website's ultimate goal is to gather research data on personalized recommendations systems.

History

GroupLens, the creator of MovieLens, also formed a commercial venture called Net Perceptions in May 1996, which had clients including E! Online and Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

. E! Online used Net Perceptions' services to create the recommendations system for Moviefinder.com, while Amazon.com used the company's technology to form its early recommendations engine for consumer purchases.

Recommendations

The website bases its recommendations on what the user provides to the website, including films the user likes, and what films other users with similar tastes prefer. When a user joins the website, they are given several randomly chosen movies and told to rate them from one to five stars, five being the best. The system then compares the user's ratings to those of other users with similar tastes, and then accordingly recommends films that the user has not yet seen. When a user looks for a specific film on the website, the system returns a prediction of what it believes the user will rate the film after watching it. The website suggests that users rate as many films that they have seen as possible so that the recommendations given will be more accurate, since the system would have a better sample of the user's film tastes.

Features

In addition to movie recommendations, MovieLens also provides information on individual films, such as lists of actors and directors, which are used to increase the film recommendations system's accuracy.

Reception

By September 1997, the website had over 50,000 users. When the Akron Beacon Journal

Akron Beacon Journal

The Akron Beacon Journal is a four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning morning newspaper in Akron, Ohio, United States, and published by Black Press Ltd.. It is the sole daily newspaper in Akron and is distributed throughout Northeast Ohio. The paper places a strong emphasis on local news and business...

s Paula Schleis tried out the website, she was surprised at how accurate the website was in terms of recommending new films for her to watch based on her film tastes.