Big Data and 4 V’s of Big Data

Story Highlights

• Big Data as a Concept
• 4 V's of Big Data
• Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity

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This article will focus on Big Data as a concept and definitions of 4 V’s of Big Data.

Understanding Big Data

Even before going to Big Data as a concept lets us understand what is “Data“. The word Data is the plural of Datum, however the word data is commonly used for both singular and plural. Data are raw facts or observations, typically about physical phenomena or business transaction. For example, sale of items in retail shop or various transactions generated in e-commerce world would generate a lot of data describing those events. Hence,

“Data are objective measurements of the attributes (the characteristics) of entities (such as people, places, things and events)”

There is one more term which goes hand in hand with data is Information. We often get confused in difference between the two. For a better view, Data acts as raw material and Information are finished products after data is processed.

The concept of big data rotates around above two terminologies “Data” and “Information” only difference is when dealing with “Big Data”, it has very large set of data to deal with. These data sets are very large and complex. Hence, to convert these data sets into the information requires various specialized techniques and cannot be processed using normal data management techniques. Examples include web logs, call records, IT operational data, medical records, military surveillance, photography archives, video archives and large scale e-commerce. Hence,

“Big Data” is application of specialized techniques and technologies to process very large sets of data.

By ‘very large’ I am talking about datasets that are in terabytes and petabytes. Various social networking sites estimated to store 1000’s of petabytes of data which includes pictures, videos, text etc. These data needs to be aggregated, manipulated, organized,analysed and evaluated continuously to give value to business and end users.

4 V’s of Big Data

Big Data involves large amount of data processing hence, the big data is divided into four dimensions

• Volume
• Velocity
• Variety
• Veracity

These are called as 4 V’s of big data. IBM is the one who defined the 4 V’s of data earlier there were only 3 V’s and as per recent data complexity IBM has added the fourth one “Veracity”. If you need more information around this you can visit IBM analytics platform website here.

Image Source: IBM Big Data Hub Info-graphic – 4 V’s of Big Data

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