Scripting Intelligence: Web 3.0 Information Gathering and Processing (Expert's Voice in Open Source) [Paperback]

Mark Watson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430223510 | ISBN-13: 978-1430223511 | Publication Date: July 1, 2009 | Edition: 1

Intelligent information management is the key to many Web 2.0 applications, and Semantic Web technologies like the SPARQL query language are helping Web 2.0 evolve into Web 3.0. This book addresses how to use Ruby not only for basic information management tasks, but also how to use it with Semantic Web tools like RDF Schema and SPARQL. This book offers practical advice and example code rather than getting bogged down in the academic and theoretical side of information management.

This book offers the reader recipes using Ruby for intelligent information management including information extraction from text, using Semantic Web technologies, information gathering (relational database metadata, web scraping, Wikipedia, Freebase), combining information from multiple sources, and strategies for publishing processed information. This book will be a valuable tool for anyone needing to gather, process, and publish web or database information.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Watson is the author of 14 books on artificial intelligence, Java, C++, UML, and Linux. He is a consultant who uses Ruby, Java, and Common Lisp.

http://markwatson.com

Product Details

• Paperback: 365 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (July 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430223510
• ISBN-13: 978-1430223511
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #250,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #77 in Books > Computers & Technology > Databases > Data Mining

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ruby-centric tutorials on Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing, and Large-Scale Data Storage and Processing Technologies, July 4, 2009

By 

Techie Evan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scripting Intelligence: Web 3.0 Information Gathering and Processing (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

This four-part book is focused on programming techniques and technologies that in the author's opinion can help next generation web applications handle data more "intelligently". The code samples are implemented in Ruby (and a little bit of Java).

Part One (Chapters 1-3) is basically an introduction to text and natural language processing, sampling tools and techniques for extracting raw text from various document types (e.g., pdf to plain text), classifying a document's subject matter (e.g., is this a document on "Health" or "Politics") or overall sentiment direction (degree of positiveness or negativeness), and recognizing entities such as persons and places in text (e.g., is "Florida" in a given sentence referring to a U.S. state, which is a place entity, or a person whose last name is Florida?).

Part Two (Chapters 4-7) provides tutorials on the Semantic Web, explaining what the RDF subject-predicate-object data format is and how a query language like SPARQL supports inferencing. URLs for publicly available RDF data sets, as well as tools and services useful for exploring them are given.

Part Three (Chapters 8-12) covers topics relating to the use of object-relational mapping (e.g., ActiveRecord and DataMapper used in standalone mode) and search (e.g., Lucene and Sphinx) technologies, publishing relational data as RDF data,and strategies for large-scale data storage involving the use of multiple servers, memcached, CouchDB, Amazon S3, or Amazon EC2.

Part Four (Chapters 13-15) includes a really good tutorial on the use of Hadoop-like Map Reduce facilities for large scale data processing, and ties things together by showing how the knowledge learned from previous chapters can be applied to the development of more substantial web applications.

The author uses many open-source gems (Ruby-centric software library) and tools in this book (most will work fine on Linux, Mac, or Windows, and with Ruby 1.8.x or 1.9, but exceptions are reported clearly), so in many cases, you only need to write a limited amount of code to follow along. If you don't want to download and install the gems, Appendix A provides instructions on how to apply for an Amazon Web Services account to access a ready to use Amazon Machine Image put together by the author for use on a rented Amazon EC2 Server Instance.

Because of the breadth of coverage, each technology can only be discussed to a limited depth, which some readers may find adequate and some may not, depending on a reader's interest on a particular topic, but most should still find this book to be a valuable resource, and that the author explains things well and concisely.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Web 3.0 technology overview, August 8, 2009

By 

Bruce Kim - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scripting Intelligence: Web 3.0 Information Gathering and Processing (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

As a software architect building a scalable web platform that will be providing communication services for its users, this book helped me quickly get an understanding of some of the key ideas, tools, and technologies that will go into the system. There may be many different definitions for "Web 3.0" but I agree with the author that no matter on its final form a big part of Web 3.0 will be more interconnectedness and more intelligent data processing and retrieval. Web-related technology is too broad and changing too quickly to be an expert in everything but as an architect I need to know enough about the different options in order to use them effectively. The text and examples from the book are clear and concise and gave me the knowledge I needed to improve the system design and with the new background information I now know what to research further.