From Forbes
12 Big Data Definitions: What's Yours?
By Gil Press
Yesterday I got an email from UC Berkeley’s Master of Information and Data Science program, asking me to respond to a survey of data science thought leaders, asking the question “What is big data”? I was especially delighted to be regarded as a “thought leader” by Berkeley’s School of Information, whose previous dean, Hal Varian (now chief economist at Google ), answered my challenge fourteen years ago and produced the first study to estimate the amount of new information created in the world annually, a study I consider to be a major milestone in the evolution of our understanding of big data.
The Berkeley researchers estimated that the world had produced about 1.5 billion gigabytes of information in 1999 and in a 2003 replication of the study found out that amount to have doubled in 3 years. Data was already getting bigger and bigger and around that time, in 2001, industry analyst Doug Laney described the “3Vs”—volume, variety, and velocity—as the key “data management challenges” for enterprises, the same “3Vs” that have been used in the last four years by just about anyone attempting to define or describe big data....