Big Data

Definition

“Big Data” is a term encompassing the use of techniques to capture, process, analyse and visualize potentially large datasets in a reasonable timeframe not accessible to standard IT technologies. By extension, the platform, tools and software used for this purpose are collectively called “Big Data technologies”.

Context awareness

Facing existing infrastructures and Big Data setups many solutions focus on processing and routing all data at once. For example, in manufacturing existing data has no relation to the context about the user´s history, location, tasks, habits schedule, etc. Concepts for taking the spatial users into account are a major challenge. The goal is to take the context into account for data that is not related to a user or context and present the right data to the right people and devices.

In the context of Big Data, contextualisation can be an attractive paradigm to combine heterogeneous data streams to improve quality of a mining process or classifier.

Context awareness is demonstrated to be useful to reduce resource consumption by concentrating Big Data generation processes (e.g., monitoring of real-world situations via cyber-physical systems) only on the sources that are expected to be the most promising ones depending on currently applicable (and often application-specific) context. For instance, “monitoring greediness” can be context-aware, thus permitting to switch off or decrease the duty cycle of expensive (in terms of power consumption, traffic bandwidth, …) sensors; industry-oriented research along this guideline is needed, with promising opportunities of cost/complexity reduction of Big Data solutions.

Visualization

Visualization, whereby humans and computers cooperate through graphics, is the means through which this is achieved. Seamless and sophisticated synergies are required for analyzing Big Data, including a variety of multidimensional, spatio-temporal data, and solving spatio-temporal problems.

Visualize...