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From streaming news updates on smart-phones, to instant messages on micro-blogging sites, to posts on social network sites, we are all being overwhelmed by massive amounts of data [33, 27]. Access to such a large amount of diverse data can be of tremendous value if useful information can be extracted and applied rapidly and accurately to a problem at hand. For instance, we could contact all of our nearby friends for a dinner at a local mutually agreeable and well-reviewed restaurant that has advertised discounts and table availability for that night; but finding and organizing all that information in a short period of time is very challenging. Similar opportunities exist for businesses and governments but the volume, variety and velocity of data can be far greater. This process of identifying, extracting, processing, and integrating information from raw data, and then applying it to solve a problem is broadly referred to as analytics.
By: Rajesh Bordawekar, Bob Blainey, Chidanand Apte
Published in: SIGMOD Record, volume 42, (no 4), pages 17-28; 10.1145/2590989.2590993 in 2013
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