Some in the industry are already writing epitaphs for big data. Others – a prominent market watcher comes to mind – argue that big data, like so many technologies or trends before it, is simply conforming to well-established patterns: following a period of hype, it's undergoing a correction. It's regressing toward a mean.
That was fast.
This doesn't concern us. Big data is an epistemic shift. It's going to transform how we know and understand — how we perceive — the world. What's meant by the term “big data” is a force for destabi