Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day. Each algorithm is described clearly and concisely with code that can immediately be used on your web site, blog, Wiki, or specialized application. This book explains: * Collaborative filtering techniques that enable online retailers to recommend products or media * Methods of clustering to detect groups of similar items in a large dataset * Search engine features -- crawlers, indexers, query engines, and the PageRank algorithm * Optimization algorithms that search millions of possible solutions to a problem and choose the best one * Bayesian filtering, used in spam filters for classifying documents based on word types and other features * Using decision trees not only to make predictions, but to model the way decisions are made * Predicting numerical values rather than classifications to build price models * Support vector machines to match people in online dating sites * Non-negative matrix factorization to find the independent features in a dataset * Evolving intelligence for problem solving -- how a computer develops its skill by improving its own code the more it plays a game Each chapter includes exercises for extending the algorithms to make them more powerful. Go beyond simple database-backed applications and put the wealth of Internet data to work for you. "Bravo! I cannot think of a better way for a developer to first learn these algorithms and methods, nor can I think of a better way for me (an old AI dog) to reinvigorate my knowledge of the details." -- Dan Russell, Google "Toby's book does a great job of breaking down the complex subject matter of machine-learning algorithms into practical, easy-to-understand examples that can be directly applied to analysis of social interaction across the Web today. If I had this book two years ago, it would have saved precious time going down some fruitless paths." -- Tim Wolters, CTO, Collective Intellect

In this insightful book, you'll learn from the best data practitioners in the field just how wide-ranging - and beautiful - working with data can be. Join 39 contributors as they explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video. With "Beautiful Data", you will: explore the opportunities and challenges involved in working with the vast number of datasets made available by the Web; learn how to visualize trends in urban crime, using maps and data mashups; discover the challenges of designing a data processing system that works within the constraints of space travel; also learn how crowdsourcing and transparency have combined to advance the state of drug research; and, understand how new data can automatically trigger alerts when it matches or overlaps pre-existing data. Learn about the massive infrastructure required to create, capture, and process DNA data. That's only small sample of what you'll find in "Beautiful Data". For anyone who handles data, this is a truly fascinating book. Contributors include: Nathan Yau; Jonathan Follett and Matt Holm; J.M. Hughes; Raghu Ramakrishnan, Brian Cooper, and Utkarsh Srivastava; Jeff Hammerbacher; Jason Dykes and Jo Wood; Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol; Jud Valeski; Alon Halevy and Jayant Madhavan; Aaron Koblin and Valdean Klump; Michal Migurski; Jeff Heer; Coco Krumme; Peter Norvig; Matt Wood and Ben Blackburne; Jean-Claude Bradley, Rajarshi Guha, Andrew Lang, Pierre Lindenbaum, Cameron Neylon, Antony Williams, and Egon Willighagen; Lukas Biewald and Brendan O'Connor; Hadley Wickham, Deborah Swayne, and David Poole; Andrew Gelman, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Yair Ghitza; and, Toby Segaran.

With this book, the promise of the Semantic Web -- in which machines can find, share, and combine data on the Web -- is not just a technical possibility, but a practical reality "Programming the Semantic Web" demonstrates several ways to implement semantic web applications, using current and emerging standards and technologies. You'll learn how to incorporate existing data sources into semantically aware applications and publish rich semantic data. Each chapter walks you through a single piece of semantic technology and explains how you can use it to solve real problems. Whether you're writing a simple mashup or maintaining a high-performance enterprise solution, "Programming the Semantic Web" provides a standard, flexible approach for integrating and future-proofing systems and data. This book will help you: Learn how the Semantic Web allows new and unexpected uses of data to emerge Understand how semantic technologies promote data portability with a simple, abstract model for knowledge representation Become familiar with semantic standards, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) Make use of semantic programming techniques to both enrich and simplify current web applications