RiVal is an open-source toolkit for evaluting and measuring the quality of recommender systems. Note: RiVal is not a recommendation framework, if you are looking for a system that will generate recommendations, have a look at LensKit, MyMediaLite or Apache Mahout.

You might also want to have a look at the RiVal home page, which contains general information about the toolkit and news.

Before you start using RiVal, you should decide on what recommendation framework to use. Each of the three frameworks listed above all have their pro's and con's. You can obviously use any recommendation framework -- not necessarily the ones listed above.

To start using RiVal you will need Java and Maven. Currently RiVal is not available in any open Maven repositories (this is in the pipeline) so you will have to compile it yourself.

Have a look at the Getting Started guide for more information on how to get your first RiVal evaluation project up and running.

• RiVal Manual
• Research using RiVal

If you use RiVal in published research, please cite our paper “Comparative Recommender System Evaluation: Benchmarking Recommendation Frameworks” A. Said, A Bellogín. RecSys 2014.

First of all: Great! We love to get contributions from anyone using RiVal. There are a few ways you can help out:

• Write documentation in the wiki (here)
• Fix bugs
• Write and clean up API documentation
• Write and clean up code
• Implement new evalution strategies, either in the RiVal source tree or as external add-ons.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to use the mailing list.

We also have a variety of documents that are useful for contributors:

• The README describes how to get the RiVal source code what you need to start working with it.
• The RiVal branching model (based on git-flow).
• Code guidelines, describing the coding style we use.
• Development tips collects various tips, tricks, and bug workarounds we have found.

If you want to make a code contribution, fork the main RiVal repository and submit a pull request. When submitting a pull request via GitHub, you warrant that you either own the code or have appropriate authority to submit it, and license your changes under RiVal's copyright license (LGPLv2.1+).