Understanding and mapping big data

Big data is an IT buzzword nowadays. Data is being collected at an extraordinary scale in very wide-ranging application areas. Big data analytics now steers almost every aspect of our society, including retail, manufacturing, life sciences, physical sciences, and financial services. One of the most common definitions of big data uses three terms starting with the letter V: volume, velocity and variety. Many leading big data companies seem to coalesce around this definition. But some are sceptical of that definition, too. This report examines and identifies several definitions of big data, including investigating how big data is understood in different disciplines, industries or contexts. Further, the report presents a working definition of big data. One of the major challenges of big data is how to extract value from it. Creating value from big data is a multistep process. Most industry sectors know how to create it and store it, but they fall short when it comes to analysis and synthesis. Scientific research is also seeing dramatic impacts as data intensive fields such as bioinformatics, climate change, and physics more effectively use computation to interpret observations and datasets. Thus, this report presents a close-up view on big data, including big data applications, opportunities, and challenges in selected industry sectors. Finally, we measure the data flows on the main intermediation platforms. These platforms are particularly relevant since they operate essentially in all countries in the world, and occupy in most countries the top position with a very large traffic. An analysis of the traffic on these platforms thus allows for a greater understanding of the global cross-country data flow.