“Big Data” and the Failure to Communicate… by Richard Murnane.
From the post:
All the talk about “Big Data” reminds me of a line or two from an old movie I like, “What we have here is failure to communicate” (Cool Hand Luke, 1967). Why? Well, we’re all talking about a concept which means different things to different people. To make things worse, the press and all the technology vendors are trying to figure this out before the people who need to operationally deal with this “Big Data” every day know what the heck is going on.
The fact is that “Big Data” is in the air and there is no denying that something is up and we all need to grow up and figure this out. The following chart is a Google Trends snapshot comparing “Big Data” to another common (but mature) IT term, “Network Security.” Notice that a year ago “Big Data” was essentially non-existent as something people were searching Google for and now it’s getting about 50% the activity as this much more common term.
You will enjoy the post and it has much to offer but I do have one small niggle. Well, maybe not small, medium? That not right either, let’s just say really, really big and let it go at that:
Richard says “Big Data” “…means different things to different people.”
What he fails to say, is that the data “inside” big data has the same issue of meaning different things to different people.
Processing (outside of a topic map or other semantically nuanced application) requires us to treat data as having one and only meaning. We may actually view or consider some data to have only one meaning. But our viewing or processing data as having only one meaning doesn’t make it so.
Data can have at least as many meanings as there are users to process or view it. (Allowing for users who ascribe multiple meanings to the same data. Post-modernists for the most part.)