Collective Intelligence Book with Examples in Java

Last Wednesday, an early  version  of my book "Collective Intelligence in Action" was made available by Manning. This is a part of their early access program where an unedited copy is made available to interested readers.

You will find this book useful if you are looking to add intelligence to your application, especially Web 2.0 applications. All the code examples in the book are in Java. In addition I do cover the ideal system architecture required for embedding intelligence along with some of the database design required to build the features.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with gathering information -- from both within and outside your application. It covers converting user interaction into intelligence, the role of tagging and building tag clouds, extracting intelligence from user-generated content. Next a toolkit is developed to harvest information from the blogosphere as well as to intelligently crawl the web. You will also learn how to leverage the open-source crawler Nutch.

The second part of the book deals with discovering intelligence. It  provides  an overview of the data mining process and introduces you to  open-source  machine learning toolkit WEKA. It also provides you with an overview of Java Data Mining (JDM) standard. Next, you will develop a text-analysis toolkit and learn about clustering data along with making predictions.

The third part of the book deals with applying intelligence to your application. It begins with an overview of intelligent search followed by developing a recommendation engine using both content-based and collaborative-based techniques.

The book has a plethora of examples to explain the concepts. There are Java implementations for understanding and implementing the key algorithms. This is typically followed by the use of open-source tools to solve the problem.

This book will provide you with a good overview of -- Lucene, Nutch, WEKA, JDM, tagging and harvesting the blogosphere.

The first chapter of the book is freely available. I look forward to your suggestions to improve the book.