Undefined By Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions

By Jonathan Stuart Ward, Adam Barker. arXiv.org, 2013

445 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The term big data has become ubiquitous. Owing to a shared origin between academia, industry and the media there is no single unified definition, and various stakeholders provide diverse and often contradictory definitions. The lack of a consistent definition introduces ambiguity and hampers discourse relating to big data. This short paper attempts to collate the various definitions which have gained some degree of traction and to furnish a clear and concise definition of an otherwise ambiguous term.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a47e047d4d41b61204255e1b265d704b7f265f4

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In Information Systems and Management

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Citations in the corpus

Review of Bridge Structural Health Monitoring Aided by Big Data and Artificial Intelligence: From Condition Assessment to Damage Detection (2020, unknown): “Then different descriptions have been presented to define the term, among which Ward and Barker (2013, p. 2) proposed a relatively comprehensive definition as follows: “ Bigdataisatermdescribingthestorageandanalysisoflarge andorcomplexdatasetsusingaseriesoftechniquesincluding,butnot…”
A Survey on Big Data Market: Pricing, Trading and Protection (2018, background): “As we discussed previously, the most commonly cited definition of big data is proposed by Gartner (2012): ‘‘Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making [39].”
Human resources for Big Data professions: A systematic classification of job roles and required skill sets (2017, background): “The vagueness of the concept of Big Data has resulted in a proliferation of multiple, sometimes contradictory definitions ( Ward & Barker, 2013; Ylijoki & Porras, 2016 ).”
Knowledge Management in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Mapping the Literature and Scoping Future Avenues (2021, background): “Thus, the level of reliability of such complicated forms of data is referred to as ‘veracity’ [39].”
Mining Big Data in Education: Affordances and Challenges (2020, background): “…generations of data collected through considerable human effort, the prevalent use of digital tools in everyday life generates an unprecedented amount of data (volume) at an increasing speed (velocity) and from different modalities and time scales (variety; Laney, 2001; Ward & Barker, 2013).”
Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development (2021, unknown): “Central to the practice of science—and as such, to machine learning—is data, the vague notion of “raw” facts, text, numbers, or other inputs that can be organized via analysis into meaningful information [39, 46, 99, 119].”