It was now just two people talking, not a news reporter mining for data like a dentist extracting teeth.

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Among them: extracting more value from public opinion data.

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Extracting meaning from datasets is a process data scientists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have already refined.

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One of the most important tasks for the researchers will be extracting meaning from the huge amounts of data created by the project.

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"If before we could extract three telephone books worth of data, now we're extracting about thirty, " says Cheever.

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Combining all these data sources in a meaningful way, and extracting useful information from them, will not be easy.

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Forbes Insights partnered with Appinions, an innovative data-mining company that measures influence by extracting and aggregating opinions from over 5 million sources including blogs, social networks, forums, and newspaper and magazine articles.

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