Big Unstructured Data and Taxonomy

Big Data.

Big Unstructured Data.

Big Unstructured Data Taxonomy?

Big Data seems to be the latest hot industry buzzword making its way through the technology world.   What does it really mean and how do taxonomies come into play to help manage Big Data (or Big Unstructured Data - BUD).

Content is being created at an unbelievable rate today.  A recent Independent Oracle Users Group study reported that one third of companies see annual data growth over 25% and nearly 10% of companies have more than a petabye (1000 Tereabytes) of data.   Big Data.

How does taxonomy fit in? 

Businesses need to evaluate strategies for organizing and understanding the huge amount of content that is created in their organization. If content is not organized in a way that you can get information out of it, then all it is doing is increasing your storage costs and bogging down your database.  A taxonomy is  a necessary ingredient to the solution.

A taxonomy model should be created for any business concerned about content overload so that existing and new incoming content can be appropriately tagged - not just for findability, but for workflows, data governance, records, and analytics.  Decisions can and must be informed by the data that is created and an appropriately deployed taxonomy is a way to help business users get at the actual information that is hiding in your Big Unstructured Data. 

To me, Big Data as a buzzword is still a loose concept.  A lot of people are talking about it, but most companies are just beginning to think about how to approach it.   As things tighten up and crystallize, I expect taxonomy to get more and more attention. And, WAND will be paying close attention and an active participant to help our customers solve these challenges.