Develop Reference

Location Based Product Recommendation Service Using Content Based Recommendations with ASP.Net & C#

I am in a bit of a crisis here. I would really appreciate your help on the matter.
My Final Year Project is a "Location Based Product Recommendation Service". Now, due to some communication gap, we got stuck with an extremely difficult algorithm. Here is how it went:
We had done some research about recommendation systems prior to the project defense. We knew there were two approaches, "Collaborative Filtering" and "Content Based Recommendation". We had planned on using whichever technique gave us the best results. So, in essence, we were more focused on the end product than the actual process. The HOD asked us what algorithms OUR product would use? But, my group members thought that he meant what are the algorithms that are used for "Content Based Recommendations". They answered with "Rule Mining, Classification and Clustering". He was astonished that we planned on using all these algorithms for our project. He told us that he would accept our project proposal if we use his algorithm in our project. He gave us his research paper, without any other resources such as data, simulations, samples, etc. The algorithm is named "Context Based Positive and Negative Spatio-Temporal Association Rule Mining" In the paper, this algorithm was used to recommend sites for hydrocarbon taps and mining with extremely accurate results. Now here are a few issues I face:
I am not sure how or IF this algorithm fits in our project scenario
I cannot find spatio-temporal data, MarketBaskets, documentation or indeed any helpful resource
I tried asking the HOD for the data he used for the paper, as a reference. He was unable to provide the data to me
I tried coding the algorithm myself, in an incremental fashion, but found I was completely out of my depth. I divided the algo in 3 phases. Positive Spatio-Temporal Association Rule Mining, Negative Spatio-Temporal Association Rule Mining and Context Based Adjustments. Alas! The code I write is not mature enough. I couldn't even generate frequent itemsets properly. I understand the theory quite well, but I am not able to translate it into efficient code.
When the algorithm has been coded, I need to develop a web service. We also need a client website to access the web service. But with the code not even 10% done, I really am panicking. The project submission is in a fortnight.
Our supervisor is an expert in Artificial Intelligence, but he cannot guide us in the algorithm development. He dictates the importance of reuse and utilizing open-source resources. But, I am unable to find anything of actual use.
My group members are waiting on me to deliver the algorithm, so they can deploy it as a web service. There are other adjustments than need to be done, but with the algorithm not available, there is nothing we can do.
I have found a data set of Market Baskets. It's a simple excel file, with about 9000 transactions. There is not spatial or temporal data in it and I fear adding artificial data would compromise the integrity of the data.
I would appreciate if somebody could guide me. I guess the best approach would be to use an open-source API to partially implement the algorithm and then build the service and client application. We need to demonstrate something on 17th of June. I am really looking forward to your help, guidance and constructive criticism. Some solutions that I have considered are:
Use "User Clustering" as a "Collaborate Filtering" technique. Then
recommend the products from similar users via an alternative "Rule
Mining" algorithm. I need all these algorithms to be openly available
either as source code or an API, if I have any chance of making this
project on time.
Drop the algorithm altogether and make a project that actually works
as we intended, using available resources. I am 60% certain that we
would fail or marked extremely low.
Pay a software house to develop the algorithm for us and then
over-fit it into our project. I am not inclined to do this because it
would be unethical to do this.
As you can clearly see, my situation is quite dire. I really do need extensive help and guidance if I am to complete this project properly, in time. The project needs to be completely deployed and operational. I really am in a loop here

"Collaborative Filtering", "Content Based Recommendation", "Rule Mining, Classification and Clustering"
None of these are algorithms. They are tasks or subtasks, for each of which several algorithms exist.
I think you had a bad start already by not really knowing well enough what you proposed... but granted, the advice from your advisor was also not at all helpful.

PDF Creating Server

I've been tasked to create (or seek something that is already working) a centralized server with an API that has the ability to return a PDF file passing some data, and the name of the template, it has to be a robust solution, enterprise ready. The goal is as follows:
A series of templates for different company things. (Invoices, Orders, Order Plannings, etc)
A way of returning a PDF from external software (Websites, ERP, etc)
Can be an already ready enterprise solution, but they are pressing for a custom one.
Can be any language, but we don't have any dedicated Java programmers in-house. We are PHP / .NET, some of us dabble, but the learning curve could be a little steep.
So, I've been reading. One way we've thought it may be possible is installing a jasper reports server, and creating the templates in Jaspersoft Studio, then using the API to return the PDF files. A colleague stands for this option, because it's mostly done, but 1º is java and 2º I think it's like using a hammer to crack a nut.
Other option we've been toying with is to use C# with iTextSharp to create a server, and create our own API that returns exactly the PDF with the data we need. Doing this we could have some benefits, like using the database connector we have already made and extracting most of the data from the database, instead of having to pass around a big chunk of data, but as it is bare, it doesn't really have a templating system. We'd have create something from with the XMLWorker or with c# classes but it's not really "easy" as drag and drop. For this case I've been reading about XFA too, but documentation on the iText site is misleading and not clear.
I've been also reading about some other alternatives, like PrinceXML, PDFBox, FOP, etc, but the concept will be the same as iText, we'd have to do it ourselves.
My vote, even if it's more work is to go the route of iText and use HTML / CSS for the templates, but my colleagues claim that the templates should be able to be changed every other week (I doubt it), and be easy. HTML / CSS would be too much work.
So the real question is, how do other business approach this? Did I leave anything out on my search? Is there an easier way to achieve this?
PS: I didn't know if SO would be the correct place for this question, but I'm mostly lost and risking a "too broad question" or "off topic" tag doesn't seem that bad.
EDIT:
Input should be sent with the same request. If we decide the C# route, we can get ~70% of the data from the ERP directly, but anyway, it should accept a post request with some data (template, and data needed for that template, like an invoice data, or the invoice ID if we have access to the ERP).
Output should be a PDF (not interested in other formats, just PDF).
Templates will be updated only by IT. (Mostly us, the development team).
Performance wise, I don't know how much muscle we'll need, but right now, without any increase, we are looking at ~500/1000 PDFs daily, mostly printed from 10 to 10.30 and from 12 to 13h. Then maybe 100 more the rest of the day.
TOP performance should not be more than ~10000 daily when the planets align, and is sales season (twice a year). That should be our ceiling for the years to come.
The templates have some requirements:
Have repeating blocks (invoice lines, for example).
Have images as background, as watermark and as blocks.
Have to be multi language (translatable, with the same data).
Have some blocks that are only show on a condition.
Blocks dependent on the page (PDF header / page header / page footer / PDF footer)
Template will maybe have to do calculations over some of the data, I don't think we'll ever need this, but it's something in the future may be asked by the company.
The PDFs don't need to be stored, as we have a document management system, maybe in the future we could link them.
Extra data: Right now we are using "Fast-Reports v2 VCL"

Your question shows you've been considering the problem in detail before asking for help so I'm sure SO will be friendly.
Certainly one thing you haven't detailed much in your description is the broader functional requirements. You mentioned cracking a nut with a hammer, but I think you are focused mostly on the technology/interfacing. If you consider your broader requirements for the documents you need to create, the variables involved, it's might be a bigger nut that you think.
The approach I would suggest is to prototype solutions, assuming you have some room to do so. From your research, pick maybe the best 3 to try which may well include the custom build you have in mind. Put them through some real use-cases end to end - rough as possible but realistic. One or two key documents you need to output should be used across all solutions. Make sure you are covering the most important or most common requirements in terms of:
Input Format(s) - who can/should be updating templates. What is the ideal requirement and what is the minimum requirement?
Output Requirement(s) - who are you delivering to and what formats are essential/desirable
Data Requirement(s) - what are your sources of data and how hard/easy is it to get data from your sources to the reporting system in the format needed?
Template feature(s) - if you are using templates, what features do the templates need? This includes input format(s) but I was mostly thinking of features of the engine like repeating/conditional content, image insertion, table manipulation etc. ie are your invoices, orders and planning documents plain or complex
API requirements - do you have any broader API requirements. You mentioned you use PHP so a PHP library or Web/Web Service is likely to be a good starting point.
Performance - you haven't mentioned any performance characteristics but certainly if you are working at scale (enterprise) it would be worth even rough-measuring the throughput.
iText and Jasper are certainly enterprise grade engines you can rely on. You may wish to look at Docmosis (please note I work for the company) and probably do some searches for PDF libraries that use templates.
A web service interface is possibly a key feature you might want to look at. A REST API is easy to call from PHP and virtually any technology stack. It means you will likely have options about how you can architect a solution, and it's typically easy to prototype against. If you decide to go down the prototyping path and try Docmosis, start with the cloud service since you can prototype/integrate very quickly.
I hope that helps.

From my years of experience in working with PDF I think you should pay attention to the following points:
The performance: You may do the fastest performance with API based pdf files generation in comparision to HTML or XML to PDF generation (because of an additional layer of conversion involved). Considering peaks in the load you may want to calculate the cost of scaling up the generation by adding more servers (and estimate the cost of additional servers or resources required per additional pdf file per day).
Ease of iterations and changes: how often will you need to adjust templates? If you are going to create templates just once (with some iterations) but then no changes required then you should be OK by just coding them using the API. Otherwise you should strongly consider using HTML or XML for templates to simplify changes and to decrease the complexity of making changes in templates;
Search and indexing: If you may need to run search among created documents then you should consider storing indexes of documents generated or maybe store more the source data in XML along with PDF file generated;
Long time preservation: you should better conform to PDF/A sub-format in case you are looking for a long time digital preservation for your documents. See the VeraPDF open source initiative that you may use to validate generated and incoming PDF documents against the conformance to PDF/A requirements;
Preserving source files The PDF format itself was not designed to be edited (though there are some PDF editors already) so you may consider the need of preserving the source data to be able to regenerate PDF documents later and probably introduce additional output formats later.

How can personal and place names be extracted from text using C#?

Is there any C# algorithm by which personal and place names can be extracted from text?
e.g., given the following text:
St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt. He was martyred, I think.
However, that has nothing to do with my legend. About the founding of
the city of Venice--
(taken from "The Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain)
...is there any way to extract:
St. Mark
Alexandria (or better yet, "Alexandria, Egypt")
Venice
?
I realize that there is no way to get 100% accuracy (where all place names and personal names are captured, and no "false positives" are added), but 80% accuracy could be very valuable.
I understand that each word could be compared with an encyclopedia or some such, but there must be a better way. Also, how could the algorithm know to combine "St." and "Mark" and to see "Alexandria, in Egypt" as "Alexandria, Egypt"?

I noticed that the links provided here are a bit dated. One project that is still active (and free [correction: GPL, so free for non-commercial]) is the Stanford Natural Language Processing (NLP) libraries (https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/). You can demo their Named Entity Recognition (NER) here. It even has a .NET wrapper (http://sergey-tihon.github.io/Stanford.NLP.NET/StanfordNER.html).
Microsoft also offers many similar algorithms through Azure Cognitive Services. You would be most interested in Entity Linking (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/entity-linking-intelligence-service/)
I hope helps future viewers.

You are best off using some kind of API that will be able to perform this kind of entity matching, as what you are asking is potentially very complex and requires some degree of semantic textual analysis backed up by a large database. I'd recommend at looking at APIs such as:
OpenCalais - English Semantic Metadata: Entity/Fact/Event Definitions and Descriptions web-service
Calais supports a rich set of semantic metadata, including entities, events and facts.
Alchemy API - Entity Extraction API
AlchemyAPI is capable of identifying people, companies, organizations, cities, geographic features, and other typed entities within your HTML, text, or web-based content. We employ sophisticated statistical algorithms and natural language processing technology to analyze your information, extracting the semantic richness embedded within.

Ship maritime AIS information API

Is there an API or Web Service that can be used to read AIS data? Most links I read starting at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System) say that AIS data is freely available but I'm having a hard time finding a provider of the data. A C# example or language agnostic web service would be helpful.

Building a project map for a clients website. Basically a world map based on the google maps api with pin's where they did their projects and if you click on a pin you get additional information about the project.
Most were just static addresses which was ok, but they did 6 project's on luxury yachts. So had the idea to base this marker on the current position of the yacht. Came across this service, they have a nice API for it.
https://www.marinetraffic.com
The down side to this, it's a bit pricey.
Cheapest option, checking daily position of 1 ship -> € 5,- a month.
So this would be € 30,- a month for a relative useless but awesome feature.
Cheaper alternative's are welcome.

I ended up using vesseltracker.com for this project. Unfortunately it's a "call us for a price" service so I'll continue looking for a provider with a flat/reasonable/free rate.

There is a feed from the San Fransisco Bay available for non-commercial use at hd-sf.com:9009.
I have used it to test my Java-based AIS decoder https://github.com/tbsalling/aismessages/wiki.

AIS data is freely available in the sense that you can freely receive it with the proper equipment, just by holding up an antenna in an area with shipping traffic.
Samples of received AIS data popped up quite a bit in my brief Google search, so I assume that your question is about where to get a real-time feed of AIS messages (that someone else is receiving). Whether you'd be able to get this at no cost is questionable; most organizations that would offer this seem to want you to either pay for the service or to share in kind.
There are a few places that offer a free stream, but none of them seem to offer any guarantees on availability in the short or long term.
So the answer to your question is "yes, and you should expect to pay something for it".

C# libraries for internationalization?

What libraries are there to write C# internationalized applications?
Typical functionalities that should be contained in the library:
Validation of country specific data (e.g. VAT numbers, phone numbers, addresses,...)
Validation of bank and financial coordinates (e.g. Credit Card numbers, IBAN,...)
Language-specific functionalities (e.g. numbers to words to numbers, summarize,...)
Language specific content filtering (e.g. swearword filtering...)
An example of such libraries in Perl would be the Internationalization/Locale section of CPAN.
What C# solutions are available?
Note: I am not looking for an introduction to the System.Globalization namespace :)
Note 2: Should I desume that there are no options available? Is someone interested in joining forces and create one?
Note 3: Edit to make the question appear on front page in hope of more answers. This isn't such a hard question, how is it possible that Stackers don't ever do i18n?

One project that is working towards a database of globalization, internationalization and localization knowledge is the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository, based on the old ICU project at IBM.
As it is a database of XML data it doesn't contain any .NET-specific code, but as a body of knowledge it is very good.
Only a smallish subset is in the .NET framework. Microsoft hasn't gone near any of the supplemental stuff, like postcode formats, number spelling (for check/cheque amounts), etc. Standard time zone names (from the Olson/tz distribution), etc. are also included, with mappings to the Windows-specific names. Some of the hierarchical locale-specific behaviours also have better support.

I wouldn't say that no one does i18n, but I don't know of any generic tools that can be used for every project. Maintaining a database with all of the information you are looking for would be an epic project. It sounds like what you're looking for isn't a specific C# library, but more a collection of information online that you can draw from. If you were able to find a repository of swear words in various languages (for example), it would be trivial for you to use this in C#. I think that finding a solution that wraps up all of your requirements into an easy-to-use assembly is going to be impossible to find.

Have a look at
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/getwr/dotneti18n.mspx
and
http://www.dotneti18n.com/

String to number and vice versa can be dones as following:
culture = new CultureInfo(locale);
int number = Convert.ToInt32(myString, culture.NumberFormat);
string str= Convert.ToString(myNumber, culture.NumberFormat);
As to checking VATS and adresses, I'm interested in that too, haven't found anything useful so far.

Not exactly a "library", per se, but I've actually ran into a great service (for pay), by a company called E4X (former client of mine).
What they provide is complete localization of your ecommerce site, including language translations, currency exchanges, local billing and handling of financial transactions including region-specific taxes etc, and more. They even deal with logisitics of physical shipping...
Worth looking into, for an ecommerce business. Let 'em know I sent you... ;-)

That's a huge endeavor. Let's start with one simple problem: phone numbers. Libphonenumber Google library at http://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/ has a C# port at https://bitbucket.org/pmezard/libphonenumber-csharp with notes at http://blog.thekieners.com/2011/06/06/using-googles-libphonenumber-in-microsoft-net-with-c/. Appears to be a good library for handling both US and int'l numbers.