Database Reference
In-Depth Information
would be, “Who is James Bond?” Over the three-day tournament, Watson was able
to defeat the two human contestants.
To educate Watson, Hadoop was utilized to process various data sources such as
encyclopedias, dictionaries, news wire feeds, literature, and the entire contents of
Wikipedia [2]. For each clue provided during the game, Watson had to perform the
following tasks in less than three seconds [3]:
• Deconstruct the provided clue into words and phrases
• Establish the grammatical relationship between the words and the phrases
• Create a set of similar terms to use in Watson's search for a response
• Use Hadoop to coordinate the search for a response across terabytes of
data
• Determine possible responses and assign their likelihood of being correct
• Actuate the buzzer
• Provide a syntactically correct response in English
Among other applications, Watson is being used in the medical profession to
diagnose patients and provide treatment recommendations [4].
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an online professional network of 250 million users in 200 countries as
of early 2014 [5]. LinkedIn provides several free and subscription-based services,
such as company information pages, job postings, talent searches, social graphs
of one's contacts, personally tailored news feeds, and access to discussion groups,
including a Hadoop users group. LinkedIn utilizes Hadoop for the following
purposes [6]:
• Process daily production database transaction logs
• Examine the users' activities such as views and clicks
• Feed the extracted data back to the production systems
• Restructure the data to add to an analytical database
• Develop and test analytical models
