Introduction to Big Data: Challenges, Opportunities, and Realities Minitrack

Big Data is still a maturing and evolving discipline. Big data databases and files have scaled beyond the capacities and capabilities of commercial database management systems. Structured representations become a bottleneck to efficient data storage and retrieval. Gartner has noted four major challenges (the four Vs): increasing volume of data, increasing velocity (e.g., in/out and change of data), increasing variety of data types and structures, and increasing variability of data. We have suggested a fifth V: value, which is the contribution big data has to decision making. Add to these the increasing number of disciplines and problem domains where big data is having an impact and one sees an increase in the number of challenges and opportunities for big data to have a major impact on business, science, and government.