Regardless of whether you refer to it with the time worn phrase “information overload” or the more trendy term “big data”, the exponential growth of bits and bytes threatens to overwhelm us. Writing in the Huffington Post, Steve Hamby, Chief Technology Officer, Orbis Technologies, offers three technologies that he says are “needed to tame Big Data” and meet the threat. First on his list is semantic technology which provides “the needed check points to properly index vital information in methods that imitate the way humans think. Next is the cloudoffering “the platform to elastically grow to support the increasing data volume.” And last on the list is natural language processing “to harvest trusted, structured data from the rapidly expanding corpus of unstructured emails, logs, and other documents.”
Hamby supports his contentions with references to classic articles ranging from Dr. Vannevar Bush’s famous essay, “As We May Think,” (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945) to “The Semantic Web” by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila (Scientific American, May 2001) as well as recent surveys like the 2010 IOUG Database Growth Survey, sponsored by Oracle.
