Big Data is the current buzzword in business, especially in the real estate sector. It helps companies to make spot decisions that are beneficial to their bottom line. But there are many challenges to overcome before businesses can take advantage of Big Data. The problem of accessing Big Data is one of these challenges. You need to know how to access Big Data before you can use them. This article will give you some strategies and steps to accessing Big Data.
As there are many ways to use Big Data, there are also many ways of collecting it. Here are the usual stages in the process of collecting Big Data.
1. Data collection – This is where you accumulate information from different sources. You can buy data from service companies that sell information. Some companies use scraping tools to collect data from the internet. You can also use the census to gather information.
2. Storing of data – This is where you put the data into servers and database frameworks. This will make it easy for your employees to access data once they need it. As a safety measure, you need to create a data backup at the time that you store the data. You can set up a physical storage device for this purpose or you can use the cloud as your storage base.
3. Cleaning the data – You need to clean up the data that you have collected. The collected data usually contains unnecessary information. This is useless information that you need to clean up. It will take up storage space in your database. Since you are collecting Big Data, be sure that you use all the available space in your databases in the right way.
4. Data organization – This is where you sort out the collected data. Organize the information so that if someone needs a particular data, you can retrieve it at once. Unstructured data is naturally disorganized so you need to concern yourself about this. It is not much of a problem with structured data since it is naturally organized. You may need to convert unstructured data to structured data if someone needs it. Use file systems like HDFS and Hadoop for this purpose.
5. Data verification – This is where you examine if the collected data is right. If the data does not make sense, it is wrong. You can use several ways to verify the integrity of the information that you have collected. Here are some ways you can check if the data is correct.
If you are able to access Big Data, it will improve the decision-making process in your company. You can use the information that you have collected to improve your bottom line. But be sure that you have the right information before making any business decision.
