Hello, Ufuk,

My son is doing his Master's degree in Data Analytics and it is all about big data. It has been an eye-opening experience for me as he shares what he is learning with me. You are quite right when you said that there are many pros and cons. Today he was sharing the many ways that big data can be used for and against humanity. It seems that this concept is like the proverbial elephant in the room; it is there, but perhaps we do not know enough about it to fully appreciate its power to enhance our lives, and its power to harm us. I do not know enough about the concept to provide any information of value; however, I am very interested in reading what others have to say about this.

Hello, Ufuk,

My son is doing his Master's degree in Data Analytics and it is all about big data. It has been an eye-opening experience for me as he shares what he is learning with me. You are quite right when you said that there are many pros and cons. Today he was sharing the many ways that big data can be used for and against humanity. It seems that this concept is like the proverbial elephant in the room; it is there, but perhaps we do not know enough about it to fully appreciate its power to enhance our lives, and its power to harm us. I do not know enough about the concept to provide any information of value; however, I am very interested in reading what others have to say about this.

Dear Ruth Maria,

Thanks for your answer. As a result of gradually increasing computation power of computer systems in terms of both hardware and software, we are facing new concept, applications. I am also expecting insightful contributions from RG members on this recent domain.

Hi.

My 2 cents. Big data is one of the best way to collect data. With a right software and analysis, researchers are able to retrieve data from netizen. However, the software is expensive and money making. When we use free software, the data collection is not specific and we will end up doing it manually.

Cheers

Hi 

Big Data is the new technology that has come in that utilizes the power of mass data from different sources.

For example the social media data. Think that there is a musical concert happening in your city and through social media like facebook and twitter many people will be discussing on the same. With the help of the hashtags we can understand how many times they are being used and discussed in the social media. This will give us an estimates of how successful the musical concert is.

This is one of the simple example that I gave but the complexities will increase if we dig into the social media database with more keywords.

Also the big data is generic term and there are many players out there who is having their own customized platforms that suits the client requirements. And the way the data is stored is different from the traditional databases and the social media data is stored as in BIG DATA.

Pros

1. We can now utilize the social media data

2. Since large data is accessed we can be sure of our analysis on top of the big data

3. The whole world is into social media, hence we can harness the data and analysis is better.

Cons

1. Have to write programs to analyse the data

2. Complexity involved in accessing the databases and their connectivity

Hope I was able to explain you answer well.

Big Data relates to computer systems based on large-scale data accumulation and procedures used to identify recurring patterns within the data.

As researcher of data models and database technologies I believe we face great challenges. In my field research, I think you have to lead efforts in methodologies that aims at supporting scalability, performance, and consistency of data, as needed by next-generation web applications, such as database design methodology for NoSQL systems and abstract data model for NoSQL databases.

@Paul Yarnold -

Hi, Paul -

You said "The difficulties are compounded when data from independent EMR systems are integrated." Do you think that the problem with data integration might be due to the fact that the two databases do not have common identifiers between or among them? There is literature that acknowledges the problems with integrating different databases; however, there is also literature that talks about the growing need to integrated different databases, and for this to be done successfully, there must be unique identifiers that are common to both databases.

Dr. Ruth

What do you think about free software named Hadoop which is used for big data analysis. Can you give pros and cons, and tips in terms of  installing and using?