ABSTRACT
The bigness of Big Data can be intimidating. Many mistakenly think finding and taming the relevant corner of Big Data is a technology problem. It’s not. It’s all about purpose, and that starts with “why?” Identifying relevant data should be approached much more like a detective story than a fishing expedition; otherwise you’ll turn up and be seduced by false positives.
The chapter identifies eight categories of data most organisations produce and a further seven categories of publicly available data they can obtain and use to tell relevant stories. Correlation should never be mistaken for causation, and in a world with bigger and bigger data sets, spurious correlations abound and noise overwhelms signal. This is straightforwardly avoided.
