ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an overview of core concepts related to Big Data in the context of decision making. It investigates the impact of Big Data on making decisions, first characterizes the general process of making decisions. There are typically four stages in the classical decision-making model. This is a rational prescriptive model, describing how people should make decisions, and not necessarily how people actually make decisions. The first step in deriving value from data is the ability to quickly find and extract data from multiple sources and integrate them. Data extraction is the process of acquiring raw data points from these diverse types of sources and relies on access to the data-storage systems. The second step in deriving value from Big Data is to effectively explore these large collections of data. Addressing issues of data integration, usability, visualization, and analytics, MATTERS exemplifies the way Big Data can inform important issues in an open and transparent way.
