Undefined By Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions

Understand

The term big data has become ubiquitous.

• Owing to a shared origin between academia, industry and the media there is no single unified definition, and various stakeholders provide diverse and often contradictory definitions.
• The lack of a consistent definition introduces ambiguity and hampers discourse relating to big data.
• This short paper attempts to collate the various definitions which have gained some degree of traction and to furnish a clear and concise definition of an otherwise ambiguous term.