The future of Big Data is Open Data

The buzz surrounding big data has been going on for over a year and it took me a while to realise that the "big data" that marketeers talked about wasn't the same as the "big data" IT people mentioned. The only similarity between the two big data's was and still is the amount of "hypeness". Both IT and marketing embraced a new concept with open arms and give it their own vision. Technical people were tempted to create high-tech solutions crunching large amounts of data in real-time. Marketing people were thrilled at the idea to collect all possible data of customers into a single large repository and draw conclusions out of all the aggregated data. As usual the two worlds didn't meet each other, but here's an idea how it could work, open data.

Open source has been around for decades and is well accepted by business, IT and marketing. The idea of opening data is an idea that grew from governments and other institutions in the idea of transparency in decision making. But, what if we used the open data to aggregate data and use it to increase customer experience. Services like siri, google now and others increase the experience because it uses "common knowledge" and make better suggestions to the user. Traffic info, public transport schedules, demographic info and location based information are all information sources that are becoming more and more "open" and ready-to-use for everybody. Let's take for instance the case of the fire department of Amsterdam that used Linked Open Data to give the fire department one single view on roads, water ways, chemical storage and housing info to create a better solution to make the right decision in the short timeframe firefighters have.

To be able to combine all this info you need a big data solution. All data needs to be aggregated and processed in real-time.  Therefore the future of big data relies in the use of open data to support decisions, make predictive analysis and make suggestions to customers.

At Commagroup, Appreciate is specialised in bringing open data solutions to it's customers. Not only do they help organisations in "opening up" their data, they also build websites, apps and other open data consumers.