[CONF] Apache Mahout > MahoutName

[co...@apache.org]

Space: Apache Mahout (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT)
Page: MahoutName (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/MahoutName)


Edited by Ted Dunning:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
{toc}

h1. What's in a Name?

A Mahout is a keeper/driver of elephants ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahout]).   Since many of Mahout's algorithms are implemented in MapReduce on Hadoop, we thought it appropriate to come up with a name that was:

1. Related to Hadoop
2. Easily findable on the web since it is a relatively uncommon word in US/Europe circles

Prior to coming to the ASF, those of us working on the project plan voted between Howdah ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdah] -- the carriage on top of an elephant) and Mahout.

h1. Pronunciation

There are some disagreements about how to pronounce the name. Webster's has it as muh-hout (as in "out" -- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mahout), but the Sanskrit/Hindi origins pronounce it as "muh-hoot".  The second pronunciation suggests a nice pun on the Hebrew word מהות meaning "essence or truth".

h1. History

Mahout was started by [Isabel Drost, Grant Ingersoll and Karl Wettin|http://web.archive.org/web/20071228055210/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Main_Page].  It [started|http://web.archive.org/web/20080201093120/http://lucene.apache.org/#22+January+2008+-+Lucene+PMC+Approves+Mahout+Machine+Learning+Project] as part of the [Lucene|http://lucene.apache.org] project (see the [original proposal|http://web.archive.org/web/20080102151102/http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Incubator_proposal]) and went on to become a top level project in April of 2010.

The original goal was to implement all 10 algorithms from Andrew Ng's paper title "[Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore|http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.stanford.edu%2Fpeople%2Fang%2Fpapers%2Fnips06-mapreducemulticore.pdf&ei=iaR8TvKYK_DTiALCq7GODg&usg=AFQjCNFaW8ZuT6xuAz61ZaoKaQ7mpmIv2w&sig2=KVaGbhPFI3rKgjtxg4yIjg]"

Change your notification preferences: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/users/viewnotifications.action