Data/Favorites version 1.00 =========================== A Favorites structure tracks the disposition of various keys. A key's disposition is a measurement of its relative predominance and freshness when tallied. This is a good way to infer favorites or other leadership-oriented facts from a historical data stream. More specifically, this structure measures how often and when various keys are triggered by application-defined events. Those keys that are mentioned often will accumulate a higher number of tally points. Those keys that have been mentioned recently will have newer "freshness" stamps. Both of these factors are metered and will affect their positioning in a ranking of the keys. At any time, keys can be culled by freshness or by their current ranking, or both. With these approaches, dispositions can be weighed over the whole historical record, rather than providing a simplistic "top events in the last N events" rolling count. Thus, highly popular event keys may remain in the set of favorites for some time, even when the key hasn't been seen very often recently. Popular items can be decayed gradually rather than cut out of a simple census window. INSTALLATION To install this module type the following: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install DEPENDENCIES This module requires only stock modules such as warnings, strict and Carp. COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE Copyright 1998-2003 by Ed Halley This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.