Big Data Types

Big data can be classified as

• Social Networks (or human-sourced information): this information is the record of human experiences, previously recorded in books and works of art, and later in photographs, audio and video. Human-sourced information is now almost entirely digitized and stored everywhere from personal computers to social networks. Data are loosely structured and often ungoverned.
• Internet of Things (or machine-generated data): derived from the phenomenal growth in the number of sensors and machines used to measure and record the events and situations in the physical world. The output of these sensors is machine-generated data, and from simple sensor records to complex computer logs, it is well structured. As sensors proliferate and data volumes grow, it is becoming an increasingly important component of the information stored and processed by many businesses. Its well-structured nature is suitable for computer processing, but its size and speed is beyond traditional approaches.

Human Generated Data is emails, documents, photos and tweets. We are generating this data faster than ever. Just imagine the number of videos uploaded to You Tube and tweets swirling around. This data can be Big Data too.

Machine Generated Data is a new breed of data. This category consists of sensor data, and logs generated by ‘machines’ such as email logs, click stream logs, etc. Machine generated data is orders of magnitude larger than Human Generated Data. Before ‘Hadoop’ was in the scene, the machine generated data was mostly ignored and not captured. It is because dealing with the volume was NOT possible, or NOT cost effective.