I was learning about Data Stores and Data Warehouses when I came across the terms Big Data and Web Intelligence. What do these terms mean? How can an organization use Big Data and Web Intelligence to increase their sales, productivity, and profits?
Let’s break this down into two parts. First, for web intelligence and second for big data. Web intelligence, simply put, is the application of artificial intelligence in applications that are powered by the World Wide Web (www). Web Intelligence empowers organizations to analyze the huge amounts of data in their data warehouses as well as the data that is recorded through user activity on their websites.
The definition of Big Data is very self-explanatory. Big Data is any data that is very large in volume and contains both structured and unstructured data. Structured data is the data that can be fit into an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) easily whereas unstructured data lacks defined structure and cannot be fit into a relational database.
Web Intelligence is a tool for business intelligence and big data enables business intelligence.
Analyzing the big data collected by the organizations can have a great impact on the productivity, sales, and profits of the organization. Big data analysis identifies trends in data that may show the decision makers what works and what does not work. This could help them avoid some drastic moves that have proven to fail in the past, and on the other hand, it may also lead them to a strategy that has worked wonderfully well previously and is expected to do the same presently.
