Introduction
Big data is the buzzword today, isn’t it?
We live in the golden age of what big data can do for business growth. Data has become a decisive factor between companies that rise and companies which don’t.
Everybody aspires to unlock and tap into the potential of big data for accelerating the growth of their business.
However, big data as it becomes available to you may not be of any immediate, business use.
Remember that most of the data is independently created and scattered all across the Internet.
Accessing it is easy but to transform it into a clean, usable form for further processing is difficult.
This is where data curation comes in.
Data curation is all about managing the data throughout its lifecycle. From the moment it is created until it is stored for future analysis and process, data curation plays a vital role.
As massive amounts of big data that we see around were created in the past 2–3 years, we have also witnessed the proportionate increase in demand for data curation.
Businesses which wish to leverage the power of big data have no other way but to harness data curation to make sense of the tons of data lying all around.
Big data needs data curation to impact business and usher in growth.
You might wonder how it works.
No worries.
We have put together a detailed review of how data curation is vital for big data.
Why Data Curation Matters
Well, simply because data curation helps you harness the data you have. The reason why it matters is that businesses are currently able to make use of only 10% of the data that they have.
They are not able to utilize the rest of the data because data remains scattered in different spaces and there’s no way to organize and integrate it for further use.
On the other hand, it would be good to remember that data is growing exponentially on the Internet and elsewhere. As a business, you cannot ignore this kind of data and make business decisions.
Whether you want to enhance your machine learning practices or deal with vast amounts of unstructured data, data curation is inevitable. Likewise, you may be able to get access to data that you need but data quality remains a cause of concern.
Data curation can act as your in-built quality control mechanism and provide you with flawless, error-proof, high-quality data.
The businesses which can harness such magical powers of data curation can eventually race ahead of others. This is why there’s an increased focus on data curation. This is the reason why the jobs of data curators have multiplied many times in the past few years.
As time progresses, data curation will cease to be a novelty; it will become an everyday, integral process in any given business.
Data Curation Makes Sense of the Data
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Big data can be immensely valuable but not as it becomes available in raw form.
In fact, in its raw form, big data would make no or little sense to you.
Data as it exists in different places and different formats is more like a puzzle that needs to be solved. What that data means is like a needle in a haystack. The difference here is that the haystack is a giant, an unbridled mechanism called the Internet.
Dealing with this kind of data flood can be quite overwhelming. Accessing this data is easy but making sense of it is virtually impossible.
Data curation has grown in significance in recent years primarily because it enables you to makes sense of these data. With the help of data curation, you can identify different data sources from where you can get the data you need. Once you have the data, you can cleanse it. In simple terms, you can weed out the spelling errors, improper entries, and missing values, etc.
Once you have cleaned it, you can transform it. In other words, you can convert it from one form to another and get a massive advantage in the way you can understand and utilize it. It’s not just limited to the form. It also involves converting the program from a particular computer language to another so that you can run it on another system. This can completely transform the way you can work with data and make use of it.
In a variety of ways, data curation can help you make sense of the data. Businesses that invest in data curation can gain a clear business advantage as they would be in a better position to spot business opportunities and get ahead of others.
Data Curation Helps You Organize Big Data
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Let’s go back to the basics.
Big data means structured and unstructured data.
Is that it? Or there’s more to it?
It’s not just these two data types but there’s more.
There’re three Vs that you need to consider: volume, velocity, and variety.
When it comes to big data, there’s a humongous volume that you have to contend with. This alone poses a big challenge. Processing such volume of data can be daunting.
While you can find some way to deal with the volume, let’s say, if you had sufficient time. But nope. You don’t have time because data does not trickle down. It comes in torrents. It floods the digital space and there’s no way to contain it or control it. The speed with which the data is created and disseminated can unnerve you.
Then there’s variety. Data is of bewildering variety. You cannot cope with data of various types that you need to select, classify, validate and preserve before it becomes usable.
This is where data curation is a tremendous help.
It can help you select the relevant data and discard which is not important. You can classify the data in a way that you can understand it and use it. You can validate it and take care of data quality. Moreover, you can also preserve it for future use in a form that is retrievable and useable.
In other words, you have tons of big data that is already out there. Moreover, you have tons of data that gets created every hour. Merely scraping all of it is not going to help you make business decisions.
Data curation is the only to organize big data and make it useable for your respective needs.
Data Curation Decodes Big Data
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Looking at big data in the raw form can be perplexing.
When you consider big data, you are looking at stockpiles of diverse types of data that you cannot make head or tail of.
Therefore, all those who think that scraping big data will be enough to derive new business insights get disappointed in the end. The reason is that big data when scrapped in its original form is like a big puzzle, a giant mystery that seems promising but there’s no way to decode it manually.
However, data curation can help you unlock the potential that big data has. You can demystify big data using data curation tools and unravel its secret patterns and insights.
Hoping that big data when scrapped from the Internet will transform your business will not help. You will need to harness the power of data curation to decode it.
Once you select, classify, validate and preserve it, you are basically taking the mystery out of the equation. Now you would be able to see what each part of the puzzle stands for. You will also be able to see where each part of the puzzle fits as far as your business is concerned.
In short, once you apply data curation tools to it, insights contained in big data will become crystal-clear.
Conclusion
The world finds big data promising because of its myriad applications.
However, big data is also a big maze that you need to unravel and navigate before you can unlock powerful insights that can accelerate the growth of your business.
This is the reason why data curation has also witnessed exponential growth.
With the help of data curation, you can apply the powers of big data to a host of varied fields such as product development, predictive maintenance, customer experience, fraud and compliance, machine learning and operational efficiency.
The better you are at data curation as a business, the more efficient you can be in your business.
The more you invest in data curation, the more you are likely to benefit from the power of big data.
While all companies in the world will compete on data in the future, the companies which will acquire an unassailable edge will be those which have leveraged data curation to the fullest.
So if you want big data to power your business, all you got to do is harness data curation as well as you and as much as you can!
