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  1. Book Review: Programming Collective Intelligence (4 messages)

    Programming Collective Intelligence is a new book from O'Reilly and Associates on the concept of collecting data from disparate sources – like, say, users – and integrate that data into your programs. It's an excellent book for anyone who wonders how to use data from other websites or how to use user behavior to learn how to service those users better. Toby Segaran, the author, uses a clear and expository style that allows you to learn how collective intelligence techniques work, in addition to seeing implementations of the techniques (in Python, but porting from Python isn't difficult, especially with how clear his explanations are.) It's not a book to learn programming, by any means – it's about the process of using data to create "smarter" applications. It also covers some techniques used in mashups, with web sites like del.icio.us, kayak, ebay, hotornot, and akismet. The first chapter is an introduction to collective intelligence, explaining the concepts behind machine learning. Machine learning in this context isn't the same as artificial intelligence – it's more like the application of data analysis such that users might think it’s artificial intelligence. The second chapter is "Making Recommendations," much like Amazon.com uses to suggest similar titles to readers. Following chapters include clustering (discovering groups of similar items in large datasets), searching and ranking (think "pagerank"), optimization, document filtering (Bayesian networks), decision trees, price modeling, support-vector machines, genetic programming, and more. All told, it's a fascinating book. Web 2.0 isn't just about interactivity – it’s about intelligence, too. Interactivity is easy to achieve, with so many web frameworks that focus on interaction. Intelligence is a little harder – and this book goes a long way to making it easy.
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  2. Metamatrix[ Go to top ]

    Shameless plug, but you should take a look at the Metamatrix Red Hat acquired a few months ago. I think once this stuff becomes open source, it is really gonna change the landscape of data integration. -- Bill Burke JBoss, a division of Red Hat http://bill.burkecentral.com
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  3. Re: Metamatrix[ Go to top ]

    Hi Bill, The book is focused on data mining (deriving information from collected data) and less so on data integration (extracting, transforming, and relating data from multiple repositories). Joseph, it looks a very interesting book and one I am likely to order. Thanks. regards, William
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  4. Re: Metamatrix[ Go to top ]

    Shameless plug, but you should take a look at the Metamatrix Red Hat acquired a few months ago. I think once this stuff becomes open source, it is really gonna change the landscape of data integration.

    --
    Bill Burke
    JBoss, a division of Red Hat
    http://bill.burkecentral.com
    It's a very interesting and exciting piece of information."Open sourcing" Metamatrix will be huge, indeed. Thanks for sharing!
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  5. Re: Metamatrix[ Go to top ]

    Indeed products like these are very interesting: Sonic DataXtend (formerly Pantero), Contivo. I haven't looked at Metamatrix yet. Interesting news.
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