BIG DATA AND ISO

14 August 2015: Edgar Dietrich

While ISO international standards are often rumoured to be quite lazy, this is not the case for the topic of “Big Data“. ISO/IEC JTC 1 “Information Technology” published a preliminary report on Big Data as early as in 2014. This report particularly specifies some important terms referring to this topic. Especially the standardisation of terms and abbreviations is to be applauded. The report provides a pool of terms and definitions authors can use to write about this topic. It puts an end to the jumble of words that has inevitably been available since the concept of Big Data came up. ISO/IEC JTC 1 offers some new descriptions and applies some terms and definitions from already existing standards.

It starts with an introduction to “Big Data” and caters to the general concept of this topic and the resulting consequences and opportunities. It also deals with the topic of “security and privacy” as is often discussed, especially in Germany. In the end, it offers a market forecast illustrating the expected growth of the Big Data market.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also founded a Big Data work group; the main focus of this group is “data management”. The following graphic is copied directly from the DRAFT NIST Big Data Interoperability Framework: Volume 2, Big Data Taxonomies (Draft Version 1, April 2015, page 13). The figure illustrates the interplay among the interested parties in a Big Data enterprise by placing them in the
context of both the information and IT value chain. This illustration facilitates the discussion about this subject considerably...