by Angela Guess
Jason Bloomberg of CIO.com recently posed the question, can the government handle Big Data analytics? He writes, “Genomics research, weather prediction and other scientific pursuits push the limit of data set size, but any business that collects information about its customers may also have big data challenges. Keep in mind Parkinson’s Law of Data: the amount of data available expands to fill the available space for it. As our technology for creating, moving and storing data improves, the big data threshold will continue to rise. If anything, it seems the relentless advance of technology is driving the ever-increasing acquisition of information—and this deluge promises to swamp even the most facile of big data strategies.”
He goes on, “Today, the U.S. government faces the mother of all big data mountains. From National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather data to earth science information from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to the genomics data at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government—and, therefore, the American people—own perhaps the largest collection of big data sets on this planet.”
Bloomberg continues, “This is extraordinarily valuable in theory, true, but worthless if we’re unable to extract the important nuggets. To mine this gold, the Obama Administration announced its Big Data Research and Development Initiative in March. Five agencies made about $200 million in new commitments toward improving big data tools and techniques: the aforementioned NIH and USGS plus the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE). The data challenges these agencies and departments face range from better use of the DOE’s supercomputers for crunching scientific data to facilitating ‘rapidly customizable visual reasoning’ for diverse DOD missions.”
