Infographic: What Data Do You Need – Big Or Small?
Wikipedia explains the differences between Big Data and small data as:
“The term ‘big data’ is about machines and ‘small data’ is about people. Small data is data that is small enough size for human comprehension. It is data in a volume and format that makes it accessible, informative and actionable.”
Big Data is a big and hot topic; we talk about it every day and everywhere. It seems that everybody is using Big Data for their business. In fact, for many small and medium businesses, Big Data is still the technology for their future.
We don’t always need massive volume of data for our business. As the icrunchdata News writer Jason Li said in his article “5 Best Practices toward Data-Driven Government”:
“In this era, we hear about Big Data all the time but people rarely talk about right data. If you have the right data, it does not have to be ‘Big’ in volume. A small amount of right data will work well to solve most problems.”
The IoT expert Ahmed Banafa wrote an excellent article called “Small Data vs. Big Data : Back to the basics” on Datafloq comparing Big Data with small data and explaining why we need small data for our business .
The Director of Vision Critical University Ray Poynter wrote another excellent article called “Five Ways that Small Data Improves Big Data” explaining how small data can improve Big Data.
The following infographic from ECM TechNews summarizes the interesting points from the articles mentioned above and highlights why small data is important in the Big Data era.
