Digital Dictionary

J

Jim Gray’s Paradigm

Serge Miranda¹ and Manel Guechtouli²

¹ Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France

² IPAG Business School, Nice, France

Data, Big Data and Jim Gray’s paradigm

In the singular, the term data corresponds to the word datum, which means the fact of giving; the etymology of data refers to the verb dare, which means “to give”! The concept of data therefore integrates the notion of giving to oneself or to a third party who will be able to derive value from these data, to capture (captare/captio) an economic, religious or ludic meaning. Moreover, humans have two major faults: they make mistakes (errare humanum est) and they forget. Data, with their associated computer processing, must contribute to eliminate or reduce these faults!

The word data can be defined very simply as the recording in codes of any real-world object or information (observation, measurement, object, event, music, film, video, photo, etc.) on any physical medium (cave wall, clay tablet, papyrus, book, blackboard, or hard drive) for later sharing (to a third party who will derive information from it). We have entered the era of real-time data accumulation from the web, social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), tagged objects (NFC, QR code, OCR), sensors (smartphones), etc. We call a smart object of the Internet of Things (IoT) any object that produces data and shares them.

Big Data integrates structured data (SQL standard), semi-structured data of the open data type (CSV, PDF, etc.), ...