What is Big Data Used for
Philipp Janert [1]:
It falls into one of two camps. The first is reporting. […].
The other camp is what I consider “generalized search.” These are scenarios like: If User A likes movies B, C, and D, what other specific movie might User A want? That’s a form of searching because you’re not actually trying to create a conceptual model of user behavior. You’re comparing individual data points; you’re trying to find the movie that has the greatest similarity to a very specific other set of predefined movies. For this kind of generalized, exhaustive search, you need a lot of data because you look for the individual data points. But that’s not really analysis as I understand it, either.
I guess ☞ Netflix competition was a bit more than generalized search as it required both inductive and deductive research.
[1] Philipp Janert: author of ☞ Data Analysis with Open Source Tools
Original title and link: What is Big Data Used for (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)
via: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/11/the-data-analysis-path-curiosi.html
