Part 1. Gathering data for intelligence

Chapter 1 begins the book with a brief overview of what collective intelligence is and how it manifests itself in your application. Then we move on to focus on how we can gather data from which we can derive intelligence. For this, we look at information both inside the application (chapters 2 through 4) and outside the application (chapters 5 and 6).

Chapter 2 deals with learning from the interactions of users. To get the ball rolling, we look at the architecture for embedding intelligence, and present some of the basic concepts related to collective intelligence (CI). We also cover how we can gather data from various forms of user interaction. We continue with this theme in chapter 3, which deals with tagging. This chapter contains all the information you need to build tagging-related features in your application. In chapter 4, we look at the various forms of content that are typically available in a web application and how to derive collective intelligence from it.

Next, we change our focus to collecting data from outside our application. We first deal with searching the blogosphere in chapter 5. This is followed by chapter 6, which deals with intelligently crawling the web in search of relevant content.