Collective Intelligence in Action

More about the book

There's a great deal of wisdom in a crowd, but how do you listen to a thousand people talking at once? Identifying the wants, needs, and knowledge of internet users can be like listening to a mob. In the Web 2.0 era, leveraging the collective power of user contributions, interactions, and feedback is key to market dominance. A new category of programming techniques allows you to discover patterns, inter-relationships, and individual profiles—the collective intelligence—locked in the data users leave behind as they surf websites and interact with others. This hands-on guidebook for implementing collective intelligence concepts using Java emphasizes the underlying algorithms and technical implementation of vital data gathering and mining techniques. It provides a pragmatic approach to personalization by combining content-based analysis with collaborative methods. Targeted at Java developers, the book features a running example of harvesting information from blogs, enabling the development of software for embedding in applications. The reusable code examples offer a working collective intelligence toolkit. You will also work with various APIs and open-source toolkits, including text analysis with Lucene, web-crawling with Nutch, and machine learning algorithms using WEKA and the Java Data Mining standard. Purchase of the print book includes a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning, along with all code from the book.