What’s Big Data?

Category: Education

As the field of research expands, more and more data are available to the audience and researchers. Therefore, big data has become one of the most eminent topics of discussion today. It has been predicted that big data will spur new research and employment trends. It also has been speculated that big data will inspire absolutely new business models as big data shoves our noses into the grindstone. What does big data mean? Big data is a term that describes an enormous bulk of structured and unstructured data. Its large size makes processing the data using traditional techniques difficult or close to impossible. Such volumes of data are huge and fast moving or exceed the current processing capacity of most systems. Although several issues involving big data exist, it can potentially aide companies in improving operations and speeding up and inspiring smart decisions. Eric Meyer from Oxford University suggested that any data that can be easily dealt with on a laptop is not big data. Because most laptop hard drives now have a capacity of 1 Terabyte or more, he definitely defined big data as datasets that are measured in Petabytes or higher. Other issues related to big data The available data exceeds our ability and capacity to cope, evaluate, and absorb it. The storage and continuing maintenance of Terabytes of data requires refined and costly infrastructure. Therefore, the cost of these services makes dealing with such data beyond the scope of some institutions, which possibly would benefit it. This in turn further adds to the backlog of data owing to the long time required to develop an analytical tool and common coding standards for analysis. Researchers are working under a flood of data, yet there is no solution to prevent the flood from affecting academic research until the existing issues of big data are resolved. A global solution for a global windfall Technological advances in the more economically advanced nations gave rise to big data; however, now data are collected from all the nations and should be provided to every nation. This demands a certain level of standardization in data collection and analysis methods. The USA and the remaining world have been attempting to bring about a convergence in the accounting standards since approximately 15 years; however, it tasted little success. The World Economic Forum’s declaration of data being an economic asset in 2012 forced the world to take a note of the urgency of resolving this issue. Fear of big data The fear of big data is based on a perception that believes in a malicious intent hidden behind all that information use. It is quite possible to find nefarious uses for it; however, one must not turn away from its extremely positive potential for information related to ourselves. Believers suggest that because science pursues knowledge, a greater availability of information using a sophisticated technology is only a rational extension of that pursuit of knowledge. There are still several discomforting and unanswered questions regarding big data–how much information can we gather, what can we do with that information, and what can it possibly reveal? And unfortunately, until the world has a satisfactory answer to these questions, the discomfort toward big data will persist.