Rerating unread but unrated items

Well, been a long time since I last posted. But let's just pick up where we left off. A good deal of work has continued on shoechicken. We have possibly gained another develop who's currently looking into integrating hibernate into shoechicken to abstract the database more than our current "helper" O.R. Mapping classes.

As noted by this posts title, here's a current question that needs answering. If items have already been rated for a user, but he or she has not yet read them yet, should those items be rerated when the next batch rating occurs? Here's a mini brain dump on the issue.

To start this off, a few basic assumptions can be made; the reclocation of an item should really represent the item's place within that set of items. It would seem reasonable to presume GUIs are going to have a difficult time presenting every single item in a potentially large set of items; thus, we can assume that an item for which shoechicken has received no kind of event has not been viewed by a user. Based on these assumption, every time a user requests a set of rated items shoechicken should do its best to reclocate each article, thereby taking into account relationships among the items.

Thinking over these terms leads to the thought that not rerating previously rated items would placee previously rated items having ratings not relevant to the current data set. Whereas, if we do rerate them then all unread articles are reclocated relative to one another.