The total amount of information stored by humanity doubles every two years. Let that sink in a little. This interesting information came from The Market Mogul in their article, “Harnessing The Power Of Big Data: Trends For 2017.”

Big data, which is blocks of data that are too big to be processed through common software packages, is getting bigger and more ubiquitous. In response, the creation of big data software and solutions are limited for businesses who want to take advantage of this technology.

The focus of big data technology is no longer on the narrow informative content, but on the broader context in which the data has been collected. This means that data will cover only a minor role in the immediate future, and metadata, which describes the data and provides additional value, will become increasingly important and complex.

It is important to note that metadata alone is not enough to build competitive big data applications. The power of big data can be truly harnessed only with a clear objective in mind and access to adequate complementary sources.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.