Introduction: Exploring The Boundaries Of Big Data

This book deals with issues involved in Big Data from a technological, economic, empirical, legal, and regulatory perspective. Big Data is a buzzword used frequently in both the private and the public sector, the press, and online media. Large amounts of money are being invested to make companies Big Data-proof, and governmental institutions are eager to experiment with Big Data applications in the fields of crime prevention, intelligence, and fraud, to name but a few areas. Still, an exact and uniform definition of Big Data is hard to come by. Most definitions roughly regard three states of processing: data collection, as Big Data concerns collecting large amounts of data, from varied and often unstructured sources; data analyses, as Big Data revolves around the speed of the analyses and the use of certain instruments such as algorithms, machine learning, and statistic correlations; and use of data, as the results are often predictive in nature and are formulated at a general or group level.