Big Data

Big Data  is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large or complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications.

The challenges include analysis, capture, curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, and privacy violations. The trend to larger data sets equates to additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on."Scientists, Practitioners of Media and Advertising and Governments alike regularly encounter limitations due to large data sets in many areas. The limitations affect Internet search, finance and business informatics.

Scientists, for example, ponder upon limitations including meteorology, genomics, connectomics, complex physics simulations, biological and environmental research, and in e-Science in general.

Data sets grow in size in part because they are increasingly being gathered by ubiquitous information-sensing mobile devices, aerial sensory technologies (remote sensing), software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers, and wireless sensor networks. The world's technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s; as of 2012, every day 2.5 exabytes (2.5×10¹⁸) of data were created; The challenge for large enterprises is determining who should own big data initiatives that straddle the entire organization.

Big data is difficult to work with using most relational database management systems and desktop statistics and visualization packages, requiring instead "massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers".What is considered "big data" varies depending on the capabilities of the organization managing the set, and on the capabilities of the applications that are traditionally used to process and analyze the data set in its domain. Big Data is a moving target; what is considered to be "Big" today will not be so years ahead. "For some organizations, facing hundreds of gigabytes of data for the first time may trigger a need to reconsider data management options. For others, it may take tens or hundreds of terabytes before data size becomes a significant consideration.