Mike Minelli: Working with big data can be classified into three basic categories […] One is information management, a second is business intelligence, and the third is advanced analytics

Information management captures and stores the information, BI analyzes data to see what has happened in the past, and advanced analytics is predictive, looking at what the data indicates for the future.

There’s also a list of tools for BigData: AsterData (acquired by Teradata), Datameer, Paraccel, IBM Netezza, Oracle Exadata, EMC Greenplum.

Original title and link: Types of Big Data Work (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/71945.html

Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and is capable of operating at 80 teraflops. Watson was written in mostly Java but also significant chunks of code are written C++ and Prolog, all components are deployed and integrated using UIMA.

Watson contains state-of-the-art parallel processing capabilities that allow it to run multiple hypotheses – around one million calculations – at the same time.

Hadoop inside™

Original title and link: About Watson (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/ibm-watson-research-team-answers-your.html

Did you know that Hadoop was the knowledge base behind the Watson supercomputer? I didn’t:

Hadoop was used to create Watson’s “brain,” or the database of knowledge and facilitation of Watson’s processing of enormously large volumes of data in milliseconds. Watson depends on 200 million pages of content and 500 gigabytes of preprocessed information to answer Jeopardy questions. That huge catalog of documents has to be searchable in seconds.

I’d love to read what other open source tools have been used when building Watson. For example has Watson used the Python-based Natural Language Toolkit?

Update: Jeroen Latour points out in a comment a presentation about Watson’s DeepQA Project and an article available in PDF format:

Original title and link: Jeopardy Goes to Hadoop (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://ycorpblog.com/2011/02/18/jeopardy-hadoop/