Summary

In this chapter, we discussed types of data that are useful for data science and readily accessible on the Internet. This discussion included details about file specifications and formats for the most common types of data sources.

We also examined Java APIs and other techniques for retrieving data, and illustrated this process with multiple sources. In particular, we focused on types of text-based document formats and multimedia files. We used web crawlers to access websites and then performed web scraping to retrieve data from the sites we encountered.

Finally, we extracted data from social media sites and examined the available Java support. We retrieved data from Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube and examined the available API support.