by Angela Guess
Michael Koploy of SoftwareAdvice.com has turned to several data experts for definitions of three of the most prevalent data buzzwords: Big Data, data warehouses, and data mining. Koploy gathered definitions that would be useful for business users. On the topic of Big Data, Bob Scott offered this explanation: “Big data references that the amount of data is growing exponentially and becoming somewhat unwieldy. It’s not just for big companies. I see small shipping companies that have data collection devices that see products move from this place to that place to this place. All of a sudden there are 50 transactions around that product–where there used to be two. [Big data] is just a technique to go after big volumes of data.”
Jake Freivald offered this explanation of data mining: “Traditionally, data mining meant applying sophisticated statistical techniques to a large amount of data in order to discover new relationships. One common example of data mining is that a retailer discovered that people (usually men) would buy toilet paper when they bought charcoal during the summer, apparently while planning for cookouts. When the retailer put toilet paper on the same endcaps as charcoal, they sold more of both. Data mining can identify relationships or trends that seem counterintuitive but have a solid basis in fact.”
