Big Data—Technologies and Potential

Recently, the term Big Data has gained tremendous popularity in business and academic discussions and is now prominently used in scientific publications (Jacobs, Communications of the ACM—A Blind person’s interaction with technology, 2009), business literature (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, Big Data. A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think, 2013; McAfee and Brynjolfsson, Harvard Business Review 90, 2012), whitepapers and analyst reports (Brown et al., Big Data. The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, 2011b; Economist Intelligence Unit 2012; Schroeck et al., Analytics: The real-world use of Big Data, 2012), as well as in popular magazines (Cukier 2010). While all these references somewhat associate the term with a new paradigm for data processing and analytics, the perception of what exactly it refers to are very diverse. The gap in the understanding of the phenomenon of Big Data is highlighted by the results of a recent study – in which respondents were asked to choose descriptions of the term Big Data – resulting in diverse characterizations such as, e.g., “A greater scope of information”, “New kinds of data and analysis” or “Real-time information” (Schroeck et al. 2012).