What is Big Data ? – The dawn of a virtual reality

As a part of this connected world through our devices, the revolution of Big data is nowadays a big stake of our lives even though some of us might not be aware of it.

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The term refers to a large amount of information collected thanks to different tools.

A huge amount of data sets gathered together and available to an organization characterized by its volume (mostly counted in more than one petabyte), velocity, complexity/variability. 

According to Forbes, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day.

Regarding public data, it exists many data points such as social media, internet browsing, location, purchases and so on.

Big data can be analyzed by using two different techniques:

- The Batch Processing: It is used when the organization have been detaining a large amount of data for a short period of time and proceed it at a certain to get results regarding a question or a situation (for example when a bank wants to analyze all the transactions that have been made during a day or more). This technique takes more time regarding the amount of data proceeded.

- The Steam Processing: It is used when experts want real-time results.

Once the data is collected, directly proceeded, and results are generated.

It is used in some industries as a way to detect frauds.

Data analysis experts can analyze and understand a population behaviors, in order to readjust companies’ strategies, communication, and targeting.

The understanding of these data can result in what we can call a “social mirror” of our society.

And not only big data is used in businesses and advertising, but also in politics, sports, science... Almost every existing areas are concerned.

Which somehow, can be frightening.

Especially when you see cases such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

Everything we do or say - online, as far as we know - is collected. EVERYTHING (almost).

Then, we can ask ourselves: Where all this is going to end?

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Sources:

- Ippolito, P. (2020). Big Data Analysis: Spark and Hadoop. Medium. 
Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/big-data-analysis-spark-and-hadoop-a11ba591c057

- Looker. (2020). Big Data Definition. Available at: https://looker.com/definitions/big-data

- Vaseekaran, G. (2017). Big Data Battle : Batch Processing vs Stream Processing. Medium. 
Available at: https://medium.com/@gowthamy/big-data-battle-batch-processing-vs-stream-processing-5d94600d8103 

-  Lohr, S. (2012). The Age of Big Data. Nytimes.com. 
Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-the-world.html