In the world of ‘Big Data’ we talk about the 4 Vs that characterize big data:
Volume – the vast amounts of data generated every second Velocity – the speed at which new data is generated and moves around (credit card fraud detection is a good example where millions of transactions are checked for unusual patterns in almost real time) Variety – the increasingly different types of data (from financial data to social media feeds, from photos to sensor data, from video capture to voice recordings) Veracity – the messiness of the data (just think of Twitter posts with hash tags, abbreviations, typos and colloquial speech)