Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 1.6
Sample weather map.
Weather data
Weather data is another common data type that companies today want to integrate in their data analy-
sis and discovery platform. Presented in
Figures 1.5 and 1.6
are common formats of weather data that
is available for integration and consumption.
Twitter data
Another popular and most requested data for sentiments, trends, and other relevant topics is the social
media channel Twitter. Twitter is a microblog and often contains less than 140 characters per tweet.
The complexity is to understand the context of the flow and the associated content before proceed-
ing with analysis (
Figure 1.7
). Twitter data has more complexity than any other web data, the reason
being the cryptic notational format used by different consumers of the platform.
Integration and analysis
Based on the data examples discussed here, you can see that a lot of information is available in
different sources and formats that can be harnessed into powerful analytics to create a disrup-
tive differentiator for an organization. The fast-food company in the example that is observing
the correlation between weather and food sales can answer the following types of questions more
effectively:
●
What sales occurred across the entire United States for a given day/week/month/quarter/year, and
under what weather conditions?
●
Did people prefer drive-thru in extreme weather conditions irrespective of the geography?
