Visual Data Web - Visually Experiencing the Data Web. Gulf of Mexico Data Atlas. With Big Data Comes Big Responsibilities. The reams of data that many modern businesses collect—dubbed “big data”—can provide powerful insights. It is the key to Netflix’s recommendation engines, Facebook’s social ads, and even Amazon’s methods for speeding up the new Web browser, Silk, which comes with its new Fire tablet. But big data is like any powerful tool. Using it carelessly can have dangerous results. A new paper presented at a recent Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society spells out the reasons that businesses and academics should proceed with caution. “With big data comes big responsibilities,” says Kate Crawford, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, who was involved with the work.
Crawford’s paper, written with Microsoft senior researcher Danah Boyd, illustrates the ways that big data sets can fall down, particularly when used to make claims about people’s behavior. Google is a poster child for the power of data. In Big Data, Potential for Big Division. Big data: Drowning in numbers. The Web, one huge database ... | Linked Data Research Centre. In an attempt to reaching out to the Web developers (called 'Hacker Joe', here ;) I've compiled a screen-cast on how one can understand the Web as a huge database . The screen-cast starts out with a bit of explanation of some essentials, however, the bigger part of it is dedicated to two hands-on examples: first we query and use data from DBPedia (the linked data version of Wikipedia) and then we look into a heavily distributed linked data form, that is, using a FOAF profile we again query and use data from there. Note that the accompanying slides are available as well via slideshare .
In case you want to test the queries used in the screen-cast along with the endpoints, here you are ... DBpedia Example In order to try it out, go to , paste it in and execute it. FOAF Profile Example In order to try out this example, go to , paste the above SPARQL query in and execute it. More Of This Stuff. Data, data everywhere. WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days. Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too.
Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America's Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. Dross into gold.