Big Data Delivering Big Knowledge

"The world is a really complex system," Smart continued. "There are seven billion people interacting and competing for resources. There are 40,000 cities, 12 million miles of road, 800 million automobiles, and understanding how all those interact and how they're all dependent on each other is a very complex system — it's a systems of systems. That computational process is very heavy data, it is big data. But more to the point, it's looking at the planet, it's really big knowledge."

To find the data it needs, to pull it, then organize and package it was a very manually intensive job for the university. Dozens of people would find and take documents, pull web artifacts and organize it. Georgetown University found it necessary to automate the integration of the tens of thousands of websites and millions of artifacts. Without automation, there came a point where they'd have to stop because it would be unable to handle the data anymore.

"It's not that we want all this data. We want to process the data to build a knowledge base," concluded Smart. "We needed data integration tools to manage the data volume to get to our knowledge base to answer really hard questions such as, how do we deploy resources, how do we minimize the spread of diseases, how do we manage power distribution, how do we manage locations of clinics, and how do we position physician resources in case of disaster and catastrophe."

While the Georgetown University Global Insight Initiative demonstrates the importance of being able to identify, access and integrate bounds of external data to solve world problems, it also highlights the need for organizations to be able to quickly, easily and accurately automate these data integration processes so they can focus on gaining and understanding bigger knowledge. Just image how having access to external sources can give your organization insight and knowledge into more competitive pricing, smarter customer profiling and operational efficiencies.