Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
come the mainstream. Big data and predictive analytics will expand in usefulness
and begin to tackle real-world problems. But what else might happen?
The following sections consider some of the potential advances that might oc-
cur based in large part on technologies that exist today. Not every possible ad-
vance will be considered; this is only a sample to show what might be possible.
Not every possible advance will really occur, but it is interesting to consider them.
There may also be totally new inventions just over the horizon that can lead the in-
dustry in unexpected directions. In fact, new and unexpected inventions are what
have made the computer and software engineering fields so exciting over the past
60 years.
Big Data
When computers and software started as business tools in the 1950s, their focus
was on local and specific data needed by individual companies or government
agencies. But with time, the World Wide Web has become the largest collection of
data in human history.
Descriptions of every public and many private corporations, financial state-
ments for every public company, sales statistics on millions of products, medical
records for millions of patients, and buying preferences for billions of consumers
all now float on the web. Useful information can be extracted from this universe
of data.
However, extracting and assembling useful information needs a number of en-
abling technologies. Ordinary database products are not sufficient. Heterogeneous
tools such as Hadoop are needed. Ordinary web browsing is not sufficient to find
and extract all of the relevant information. New kinds of “intelligent agents” sim-
ilar to Wolfram Alpha are needed to search and condense useful information from
perhaps millions of websites.
The potential value of big data is high. It would be possible to analyze the busi-
ness strategies of every company in every industry; it would be possible to evalu-
ate the effectiveness of every possible therapy for critical conditions such as Lyme
disease; it would be possible to compare every health-care program in the world
for both medical results and cost-effectiveness; it would be possible to compare
the performances of every state government and every municipal government. But
new companies and powerful new tools will be needed to make big data as effect-
ive as theory suggests it might be.
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