Big Data Now: 2015 Edition

Chapter 6. Applications of Big Data

Because the big data space stretches across many industries, organizations, and users, there are a wide wide variety of use cases and applications. Mike Hadley, senior director of emerging products and technology at Autodesk, delivered a keynote at Strata + Hadoop World London that described his company’s use of an unsupervised machine learning system that operates against 3D models to discover patterns and identify taxonomies among various hardware products. The goal is to create a “living catalog” of each user’s creations that will inform future designs. During her Strata + Hadoop World London keynote, Cait O’Riordan, VP of product, music, and platforms at Shazam, discussed how her company is using big data to predict Billboard music hits. This chapter’s collection of blog posts conveys big data’s utility and power through current, real-world applications. 

First, Gerhard Kress discusses how railways are at the intersection of Internet and industry. Max Neunhöffer then discusses multimodel databases and describes one area where the flexibility of a multi-model database is extremely well suited—the management of large amounts of hierarchical data, such as in an aircraft fleet. Liza Kindred then explains how the fashion industry is embracing algorithms, natural language processing, and visual search. Finally, Timothy McGovern summarizes how oil and gas exploration have long been at the forefront of data collection and ...