Big Data refers to vast volumes of data, collected mainly through recent technologies (mobile phones, sensors, and so on), which are then used to create information or, more precisely, knowledge.
Four simultaneous developments have driven the emergence of Big Data:
– the advent of the Internet of Things, which has greatly increased the amount of personal data collected via social media;
– the widespread adoption of mobile devices such as cell phones;
– the emergence of new software architectures for handling data (notably the Cloud, which allows a small business or an individual to process large volumes of data without having the hardware infrastructure to do so);