People love to talk about big data. But people across all industries seem to offer different definitions of what big data actually is.
University of California Berkeley School of Information asked thought leaders in a variety of industries how they define big data. Here are 10 of their definitions.
1. John Akred, founder and CTO of Silicon Valley Data Science, a business-focused big data and data science company: "'Big data' refers to a combination of an approach to informing decision making with analytical insight derived from data and a set of enabling technologies that enable that insight to be economically derived from at times very large, diverse sources of data."
2. Philip Ashlock, chief architect of Data.gov: "While the use of the term is quite nebulous and is often co-opted for other purposes, I've understood 'big data' to be about analysis for data that's really messy or where you don't know the right questions or queries to make — analysis that can help you find patterns, anomalies or new structures amidst otherwise chaotic or complex data points."
3. Reid Bryant, data scientist at Brooks Bell, a testing and optimization provider: "As computational efficiency continues to increase, 'big data' will be less about the actual size of a particular dataset and more about the specific expertise needed to process it. With that in mind, 'big data' will ultimately describe any dataset large enough to necessitate high-level programming skill and statistically defensible methodologies in order to transform the data asset into something of value."
4. Mike Cavaretta, data scientist and manager at Ford Motor Company: "I see big data as storytelling — whether it is through information graphics or other visual aids that explain it in a way that allows others to understand across sectors."
5. Drew Conway, head of data at Project Florida, a health data startup: "Big Data, which started as a technological innovation in distributed computing, is now a cultural movement by which we continue to discover how humanity interacts with the world — and each other — at large-scale."
6. Josh Ferguson, CTO of Mode Analytics, a data analysis provider: "Big data is the broad name given to challenges and opportunities we have as data about every aspect of our lives becomes available. It's not just about data though; it also includes the people, processes and analysis that turn data into meaning."
7. Daniel Gillick, senior research scientist at Google: "'Big data' represents a cultural shift in which more and more decisions are made by algorithms with transparent logic, operating on documented immutable evidence. I think 'big' refers more to the pervasive nature of this change than to any particular amount of data."
8. Annette Greiner, lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Information: "Big data is data that contains enough observations to demand unusual handling because of its sheer size, though what is unusual changes over time and varies from one discipline to another."
9. Harlan Harris, director of data science at Education Advisory Board, president and co-founder of Data Community DC, an organization of data professionals: "To me, 'big data' is the situation where an organization can (arguably) say that they have access to what they need to reconstruct, understand and model the part of the world that they care about."
10. David Leonhardt, editor of The Upshot at The New York Times: "Big data is nothing more than a tool for capturing reality."
To read more definitions of big data, please click here.
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