Here at Service Objects, we love data almost as much as we love our dogs. Few things make us happier than exploring or talking about data. Turns out, we’re not the only ones obsessed with data. Check out the following data buzzwords and join the conversation.
Smart Data
In the last 30 days, “smart data” was mentioned on Twitter 9,234 times. What is it? You know what big data is, right? It’s massive, but it doesn’t always make sense. Denis Igin from NXCBlog explained smart data this way:
“…big data is what we know about consumer behavior, while smart data is how we discover the underlying rationale and predict repetition of such behavior… In short, smart data is adding advanced business intelligence (BI) on top of big data, in order to provide actionable insights.”
Business intelligence and data quality software help you make sense of data. Now that’s smart!
Data Warehousing
Another 1,000+ conversations on Twitter in the last month have centered on “data warehousing.” What is it? Wisegeek explains it best:
Data warehousing combines data from multiple, usually varied, sources into one comprehensive and easily manipulated database.
For example, Service Objects’ data quality services tap into our massive database which pulls data from various sources such as the US Postal Service, telephone databases, and GPS mapping databases to validate, standardize, and enhance data.
Dark Data
Topsy’s Social Analytics reveals nearly 1,700 Twitter mentions for “dark data” in the last month. According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, dark data is defined as:
“… the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes (for example, analytics, business relationships and direct monetizing).”1
In other words, dark data is data that’s not being used. It’s often kept solely for compliance purposes. What if you could enhance that data and put it to good use? Using data quality software, for example, you could validate older, potentially obsolete, addresses and create a direct marketing campaign targeting former customers.
Big Analytics
With over 23,000 mentions in the last month, “big analytics” is definitely buzzworthy.
Big data analytics is the process of examining large data sets containing a variety of data types — i.e., big data — to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful business information.
Big analytics goes hand-in-hand with big data. When big analytics and data quality services work together, your data becomes much smarter and easier to work with.
The Internet of Things
We saved the biggest buzzword for last: “The Internet of Things. Also commonly referred to as “IoT,” the Internet of Things refers to a dramatically more connected Internet. Remember when the only things connected to the Internet were computers and servers? How quaint is that? Look around your personal space. You may have a desktop scanner that scans documents directly to Dropbox or Evernote. Maybe you’re wearing a Fitbit, which transmits your fitness and health stats directly to Fitbit.com. You may even have Internet-connected light bulbs or video surveillance system. If you’re really fancy, your refrigerator connects, tracking UPC codes and notifying you when your milk is about to go sour. On a larger scale, industrial equipment, parking meters, weather stations, and more are connected.
How many mentions did it get in the last 30 days? Over 150,000 for “Internet of Things” and another 74,000 for “IoT.” Now that’s trending!
As you can imagine, all those IoT “things” are generating data, contributing to big data. Each of these data buzzwords is interrelated and reflects the need for solutions such as data quality services and analytics.
1 Gartner IT Glossary, Dark Data, http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/dark-data
