Section: New Software and Platforms

Odin: an intermediation platform

Odin is a middleware framework for building intermediation platforms. It is build over a kernel that stores users data and activities on a noSQL database and a full client/server JavaScript communication stack. The kernel is used to build intermediation platforms for any kind of project management systems, and where projects peculiarities are handled through a plugin architecture. Plugins are used to define dedicated crawlers over the Web that gather information and push recommendation toward users. The framework maintains an internal currency used to trigger a subset of agents used for recommendation. These recommendations must be mapped to the project keywords and user profile. Each user project is associated to a specific amount of money in our currency, and project users may use this currency to drive their virtual agents. If agents are correctly driven, projects may gain more money used to obtain better recommendations or used on other projects. Our goal is to gather a huge amount of users in order to study system scalability in a real life application. We use odin to test and validate search engines, recommendation engines, external resource crawling, and social network user experiences.