Getting the data

For this chapter, actually acquiring the data will be relatively easy. In other chapters, this step involves screen scraping, SPARQL, or other data extraction, munging, and cleaning techniques. For this dataset, we'll just download it from Infochimps (http://www.infochimps.com/). Infochimps is a company (and their website) devoted to Big Data and doing more with data analysis. They provide a collection of datasets that are online and freely available. To download this specific dataset, browse to http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/60000-documented-ufo-sightings-with-text-descriptions-and-metada and download the data from the link there, as shown in the following screenshot:

The data is in a ZIP-compressed file. This expands the files into the chimps_16154-2010-10-20_14-33-35 directory. This contains a file that lists metadata for the dataset as well as the data itself in several different formats. For the purposes of this chapter, we'll use the tab separated values (TSV) file...