Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Design Principles for Contextualizing Big Data
Contextualizing big data involves several key design principles when it comes to creating
solutions that deliver real insight:
•
Ingest and integrate data
from anywhere:
Companies are
expanding their quest for data into data sources that were
previously never considered, and they are going beyond the
“system of records” to “system of engagements.” The objective
should be to develop rich data sets by combining the qualitative
structured data with the important context provided by
unstructured data.
System of record denotes to data contained within the corporate
firewalls, which are of high quality, cleansed and have well defined
structure associated with it.
Systems of engagement denotes to data sources and applications
that are very much a part of the business eco-system but stay outside
the corporate firewalls. The associated data is often unstructured, not
well defined and not quality controlled.
•
Discover and seek patterns.
Big data analysis use cases do
not follow a predefined path of analysis; they are always led
by a train of thought finally leading to the insight generation.
While doing this kind of analysis, one does not look for accuracy
and precision. If you are able to show newer patterns in the
data within a reasonable range of error percentage, you have
achieved your task.
•
Provide actionable insights.
Insight generation is critical for
innovation. However, just generating insights is not enough;
you should strive to provide means to make the insights
actionable.
•
Collaboration and reusability.
While solving a particular
problem, a data scientist may be following a different set of
processes, tools, and approaches. The data sets you use, the
models you develop, and the visualizations you create, all
need to be documented so that others can understand what
you did and how you did it. The goal is to get the capabilities
into the hands of analysts in business units, allowing them
to create analytic reusable workflows following the path you
have taken.
