What is Collective Behavior

Due to the digital nature of the web, the social web mimics the real-world social dynamics that manifest themselves as data and can be easily mined as patterns, making the web a fertile ground for business and research-oriented analytical applications. Collective intelligence (CI) is a multifaceted field with roots in sociology, biology, and many other disciplines. Various manifestations of CI support the successful existence of large-scale social systems. This chapter gives an overview of the principles of CI and the concept of “wisdom of crowds” and highlights how to maximize the potential of big data analytics for CI. Also, various techniques and approaches have been described that leverage these CI concepts across a diverse range of ever-evolving social systems for commercial business applications like influence mining, expertise discovery, etc.