Intelligence in the Cloud

We have seen how web and cloud technology allow us to easily store and process vast amounts of information, and as we saw in Chap. 6, there are many different data storage models used in the cloud. This chapter looks at how we can start to unlock the hidden potential of that data, to find the ‘golden nuggets’ of truly useful information contained in the overwhelming mass of irrelevant or useless junk and to discover new knowledge via the intelligent analysis of the data. Many of the intelligent tools and techniques discussed here originated well before cloud computing. However, the nature of cloud data, its scalable access to huge resources and the sheer size of the available data means that the advantages of these tools are much more obvious. We have now reached a place where many common web-based tasks would not be possible without them.