Metadata is fast becoming a household term, with the news constantly using it alongside the NSA scandal and inflaming news, conspiracy theories, and the like. But does the average person understand what metadata is, what it can and can’t do? Most of all, do they understand the importance of big data? ZDNet brought this interesting topic to our attention in their article, “Does anyone really understand big data?”
The single point that makes understanding big data so elusive, even for the technology community, is that we weren’t really prepared for big data or its management. Considering that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years, it is easy to understand how overwhelming it all can be. Every day, our data grows by more than 2.5 quintillion (2,500,000,000,000,000,000) bytes, or just over two billion (2,328,306,436.5) gigabytes. Think about those numbers for a minute. That is a whole lot of zeros.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.