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September 22, 2015

Data is the new oil

Writing for The Nation, Dr Rohan Wickramasuriya, a Research Group Leader at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, argues that big and small data has the potential to fuel economic development.

Dr Rohan Wickramasuriya writes:

"Knowingly or unknowingly, every one of us relies on data to make a myriad of daily decisions.... While such humble uses of data will continue to have their place, a revolution has already begun in terms of how data is generated and used in modern societies."

"Technological advancement and fast penetration allows data to be generated at a rapidly increasing rate. Global data volume reached 2.8 trillion gigabytes in 2012 with 90 percent of this data being created in the previous two years alone. At this rate, global data volume is predicted to grow 50 times by the year 2020. To put this into perspective, global per capita data volume in 2020 will roughly be 5200 gigabytes," he adds.

"Unfortunately, data is like crude oil, largely unusable in the original form. Valuable insights from data can only be gained by cleaning, organising and analysing. However, less than 1 percent of the world’s data has been analysed so far. This ‘big data’ is capable of providing an estimated economic value of US$ 3 trillion per year in just seven industries, including education, transportation, consumer products, electricity and healthcare."

Dr Rohan says the most challenging element of big data is its variety.

"Data comes in a range of types and formats and is structured, semi-structured and unstructured in nature. Structured data refers to data that is neatly organised for easy storage, querying and analysis. Some examples of structured data are name, date, address and various identification numbers like a passport number. Unstructured data, on the other hand, does not follow a pre-defined model and is unorganised. In reality, however, most of today’s data falls somewhere between these two ends, hence are called semi-structured data. Good examples are text, images, audio, video and sensor logs. A text message posted on Twitter or Facebook is semi-structured because it is accompanied by organised metadata such as the date and time, username and location."

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