Big Data Analytics Tools
Information, by a broad definition, is systematically structured, processed and organised information designed to support critical decision making in business. It gives context to data and allows effective decision making. For instance, a single consumer’s sale in a particular restaurant is comprehensive information-this becomes information only when the company is able to identify which food is the most popular or least common. It’s also called critical information because it can guide future decisions. Thus, information architecture involves the development of information systems whose main purpose is to store, retrieve, manipulate and deliver information in a controlled and informative way.
According to Vital Vitale (in his famous book “What Information Grows up to”) there are five stages of information accumulation: acquisition, extraction, analysis, modification and utilization. In simple terms, information exists when a person collects information about something. The process of acquiring and extracting information is known as acquisition and the information that is extracted can be termed as extraction. Analysis is the process of turning the raw data into something useful and the process of modifying information takes place later. Finally, utilization is the process of putting together what has been learned and used and what needs to be changed to fit better with the organisation’s needs.
Information can be complex and it is necessary to aggregate and classify it in different ways to make sense of it and make sense of the facts that it contains. Aggregating and classifying data requires expertise and specialised software programs. There are many uses of software and it is very common to have programmers create reports on the back end. These programmers are known as Information Scientists who can combine databases, statistical tools, code and sometimes semi-personal knowledge of individual facts from the relevant disciplines, like business practices, economics, engineering etc to create an information model.
One very important way of aggregating and classifying facts and turning them into usable information is through what we call Knowledge Discovery and application. This is a set of processes that have been developed over the last few decades to make the accumulation and compilation of information more manageable. Knowledge discovery and application use a wide range of techniques for the purpose. One technique that is used is the use of big data. Another technique is what is called Knowledge extraction and application.
Knowledge discovery and application processes usually start by categorising the information that is found. This may be done manually or using big data analytics tools. Then the scientists and researchers will extract the relevant facts out of the large amount of raw data. They then put this data into a format that is easy to manipulate and extract meaning from. This process is called Knowledge Extraction and once this is done, scientists can make inferences and predictions from the information extracted.
Now we all know that knowledge has to be used and understood. But how does it help us in our day to day lives? Well, it helps a lot in various ways including making a better decision and implementing strategies that will take us closer to our goals and aspirations. Big data analytics tools can be used to facilitate this process. These are sophisticated software tools that are specifically designed for this purpose and they allow for the easy extraction of knowledge from large amounts of data sets.
