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IoT Without Big Data is Nothing
Imagine Industrial IoT as the nervous system of a company: it is a network of sensors that collects valuable information from all corners of a production plant and stores it in a repository for data analysis and exploitation. This network is necessary to measure and obtain data in order to make informed decisions. But what happens next? what should we do with all that data? We always talk about making good decisions based on reliable information, but although it may sound obvious, it is not always that easy to achieve that goal. In this article, we will go a bit beyond IoT and will focus on the data and how to leverage it with AIoT and data analytics.
We’ll be discussing specifically the analysis phase, the process that turns data first into information and then into knowledge (sometimes also referred to as business logic). In the end, however, we won’t stray far from the core subject of IoT, because for us IoT without Big Data is meaningless.
Big Data and Data Analytics
In recent decades, especially in the ’10’s, we have witnessed an incredible flood of data (both structured and unstructured), mass-produced by the ubiquity of digital technologies. In the particular case of the industrial world, taking advantage of and fully utilizing this huge amount of information is paramount to success.
This need to process business data has given rise to the largely interchangeable terms “Big Data,” “Data Science,” and “Data Analytics,” which we could collectively define as the processes we follow to examine the data captured by our network of devices, with the goal of revealing obfuscated trends, patterns or correlations. This is done with the underlying goal of improving the business with new types of knowledge.
Because it is a recently created term, there are different definitions for Big Data. One of them provided by Gartner outlines 3 key aspects: the volume of data, its variety, and the velocity with which it is captured. These are commonly referred to as the 3 V’s, although other definitions expand on this to include 5 V’s, adding the veracity of the data and the value they bring to the business.
We believe, though, that it does not make much sense to go into theoretical disquisitions on what does and does not qualify as Big Data, because thanks to the ubiquity of data collection devices, Big Data analysis and processing is already applicable to large swaths of the industrial world.
IoT and Big Data
How do IoT and Big Data relate to each other? The main point of connection is usually a database. In general terms, we could say that the work of IoT ends at that database; put another way, the goal of IoT is to dump all the data acquired in a more or less orderly manner in a common repository. The domain of Big Data starts by accessing that repository to manipulate the acquired data and get the information needed.
In any case, it is useful to visualize IoT Big Data Analytics as a toolbox. Depending on the type of information and knowledge we want to acquire from the data, we will draw one tool or another from it. Many of these tools come in the form of traditional algorithms, as well as …….