NIST Starts Work on Big Data Roadmap

Published: June 26, 2013

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Close to 90 attendees participated in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Big Data Working Group meeting on Wednesday, June 26, 2013. Led by Wo Chang, a digital data advisor with NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory, the session laid the ground work for ambitious collaboration to provide several deliverables by the end of September 2013.

NIST is leading development of a Big Data Technology Roadmap, which will define and prioritize requirements for interoperability, reusability, and extendability for big data analytic techniques as well as technology infrastructure to support secure and efficient adoption. To help develop these ideas, NIST has formed a public working group to form a community of interest from industry, academia, and government.
 
The goals for the NIST Big Data Working Group (NBD-WG) are to develop definitions, taxonomies, reference architectures, and a technology roadmap to enable innovation. In fact, the four deliverables will be comprised of:
·          Big Data Definitions
·          Big Data Taxonomy
·          Big Data Reference Architecture, and
·          Big Data Technology Roadmap
 
Individual topics will be addressed separately by five subgroups:
  • Big Data Definitions and Taxonomies Subgroup 
  • Big Data Reference Architecture Subgroup 
  • Big Data Requirements Subgroup 
  • Big Data Security and Privacy Subgroup 
  • Big Data Technology Roadmap Subgroup 
Use cases and use case requirements will be treated by a subgroup reflector, enabling collaboration discussions via email. Progress and findings will be presented at the working group level during weekly meetings. Once co-chairs for the subgroups are named, they will help drat the subgroup charters and identify options for meeting logistics and coordination. All of the subgroup will be contributing to the Big Data Technology Roadmap. Taxonomy identifying the key components and players will be tightly coupled with ontology, and both will help to shape the reference architecture. Requirements will include both use case and other technical requirements. Requirements for the reference architecture will be examined and developed to align with the taxonomy.
 
The goal of the Big Data Technology Roadmap will be to define central processes and approaches leading to efficiency gap analysis for Big Data tools and practices. Specific milestones will be determined once the working group has initiated regular meetings, which will occur weekly on Wednesdays. However, the target date for completion of an initial draft for the Big Data Technology Roadmap has been set for Friday, September 27, 2013.
 
The initial plan for development of the deliverables in this tight timeframe is as follows:

Participation in the working group is open to all interest parties. More information is available on the effort at the working group’s collaboration site.