The latest Digital Universe Study by International Data Corporation (IDC), sponsored by EMC has good tidings for topic maps:
All in all, in 2012, we believe 23% of the information in the digital universe (or 643 exabytes) would be useful for Big Data if it were tagged and analyzed. However, technology is far from where it needs to be, and in practice, we think only 3% of the potentially useful data is tagged, and even less is analyzed.
Call this the Big Data gap — information that is untapped, ready for enterprising digital explorers to extract the hidden value in the data. The bad news: This will take hard work and significant investment. The good news: As the digital universe expands, so does the amount of useful data within it.
But their “good news” is blunted by a poor graphic:
A graphic poor enough to mislead John Burn-Murdock to mis-report in Study: less than 1% of the world’s data is analysed, over 80% is unprotected (Guardian):
The global data supply reached 2.8 zettabytes (ZB) in 2012 – or 2.8 trillion GB – but just 0.5% of this is used for analysis, according to the Digital Universe Study.
and,
Just 3% of all data is currently tagged and ready for manipulation, and only one sixth of this – 0.5% – is used for analysis. The gulf between availability and exploitation represents a significant opportunity for businesses worldwide, with global revenues surrounding the collection, storage, and analysis of big data set to reach $16.9bn in 2015 – a fivefold increase since 2010.
The 3% and 0.5% figures apply to the amount of “potentially useful data, as is made clear by the opening prose quote in this post.
A clearer chart on that point:
Or if you want the approximate numbers: 643 exabytes of “potentially useful data,” of which 3%, or 19.29 exabytes is tagged, and 0.5%, or 3.21 exabytes has been analyzed.
Given the varying semantics of the tagged data, to say nothing of the more than 624 Exabytes of untagged data, there major opportunities for topic maps in 2013!
Merry Christmas Topic Maps!