MUSCAT: Participants at the Big Data Seminar held here on Monday highlighted the big data innovations now making an impact on the various sectors of the economy and society such as government agencies, transport authorities, banks, telcos, oil and gas producers, industries and retailers -- plus large to small enterprises. The event organised by Knowledge Oasis Muscat (KOM), the technical arm of the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE), brought together a host of experts who analysed how big data is predicting and delivering better services -- while improving quality, productivity, benefits and speed of decision making to the community.
"Big Data can be defined as profiting from data that was previously ignored, because of technology limitations,'" said an expert.
The participants also urged the immense need to advance big data privacy and information security, taking into consideration the challenges that are faced today in the realm of creating meaningful data from raw data, ranging from analysing, storage and transferring of data to content privacy and content accessibility.
In his speech, Mohamed al Maskari, Director-General, KOM, said the concept of big data, its significance and challenges are generating great importance and interest in the current era where various organisations are competing in the fields of productivity and creating an apt environment for innovation.
"According to a recent conducted study, data analysis tools will emerge and change the shape of competition in the related fields during the three coming years. Around 89 per cent of the organisations, which will not adopt big data analysis strategy in the coming year, will endure loss of part of its market share for its inability to enforce its competitiveness. On the other hand, the institutions which will implement big data technologies will attain significant and positive returns to expand their activities and achieve faster access to infrastructure," Al Maskari pointed out.
The seminar touched upon the proactive approach of data privacy, security systems and control; creation of effective and bespoke models with the help of big data; and embracing the new roles and responsibility of data analysts.
The event was moderated by Nadra al Amri, IT Security Consultant of Protiviti, and featured a line-up of experts in the field comprising Hamed al Shukairi, Director of Digital Services and Initiatives at the Ministry of Education; Lenin John Varghese, General Manager at ezTEch LLC; Albert J Wessels, Pipeline Integrity Engineer and Data Analyst at Integrity Smart Services LLC; and Suhail Khan, General Manager at SIMPA Research Consultancy.
Elaborating on the significance of big data, Nadra al Amri noted that big data plays a vital role in making good use of your enterprise's big data strategies to extract valuable data that gives you a competitive edge, enhancing the ability to make faster and better decisions for a big data enterprise, using marketing analytics to mine data and evaluate marketing performance in addition to, identifying customer's purchasing habits and needs, and boosts the benefit of better knowledge sharing and communication.
Adding to Al Amri's aforementioned challenges, Albert J Wessels said, "The challenges concerning big data in the current era is first of all, simply knowing how to manage the vast amounts of data certain activities can generate (such as clicks on online adverts, tweets, webserver logs, IoT sensor results, etc.), how to store it and extract data into relational databases, whereupon it can be mapped and reduced into information that can be used for decision making, and then building models to accurately analyse and predict future data via machine learning."
Hamed al Shukairi outlined four types of data namely, volume of data, variety of data, velocity of data, and veracity of data. Al Shukairi explained that big data comes from a variety of sources including streaming data, social media data, publicly available sources, among others.
© Oman Daily Observer 2015
