Big Data and Social Media & Web Analytics Innovation Dr. Brand Niemann Director and Senior Enterprise Architect – Data Scientist Semantic Community AOL Government Blogger September 13,

Event Description Name: Big Data Innovation September 13 & 14, Boston, 2012 Venue: Hyatt Regency Boston One, Avenue de Lafayette, Boston, Massachusetts, USA IE. would like to introduce you to the Big Data Analytics Innovation Summit, being held in Boston, September 13 & 14, Overview: – The summit includes 80+ sessions and over 400 senior executives sharing insights & innovations on Big Data and how it's impacting business strategy. – The Big Data Innovation Summit is the largest gathering of Fortune 500 business executives leading Big Data initiatives. – Confirmed Speakers Include: - Principal Scientist & Group Leader, NASA - Vice President, Big Data Analytics, Walt Disney - Chief Technology Officer, American Express - Senior Director, Big Data, Nokia - Chief Scientist, Paypal - Principal Data Scientist, LinkedIn - Chief Data Officer, Chartbeat - Senior Director, Marketing Analytics, Expedia - Data Scientist, Twitter - Manager, Data Science & Analytics, Facebook and many more... Wondering what to expect? Have a look at Social Data Lab's presentation from last year – Sign up by contacting Dan Watts at or registering online at Follow the hashtag #BDBN to keep up to date with summit news 2

Story-Pre-Summit These two summits being held in Boston, September 13 & 14, 2012, certainly caught my attention and when I reviewed their web pages and videos I found some common themes that attract attendees and myself:two summits – What is big data and social media and how do you do analytics on it? – How do you integrate unstructured and structured data sources? – How do you find out what your colleagues and competitors are doing with big data and social media and making a living at it? – What can I learn from this conference and who can I meet at this conference that will make it worth my attendance? 3

Story-Pre-Summit My short answer would be to say in my experience you have to do your homework and data science analytics before you attend the conference. So I decided to show you how to do that before the conference here and then after the conference to finish that process in a second story. Big data is best described by four Vs: volume (massive size), velocity (real-time), variety (unstructured, structured, video, etc.), and value (worth the hardware, software, and talent to deal with). Social media is all the stuff that takes up so much of our valuable time: , Tweets, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.). Data Science Analytics is getting something useful from all of that and being able to communicate that effectively to others that are less technical and justify it to those that are more technical than we are. 4

Story-Pre-Summit So what I like to do to illustrate (data science) and explain (data journalism) is the following (like a recipe): – Put the Best Content into a Knowledge Base (e.g. MindTouch) The IE Group Web Site for the Summits – Put the Knowledge Base into a Spreadsheet (Excel) Linked Data to Subparts of the Knowledge Base – Put the Spreadsheet into a Dashboard (Spotfire) Data integration and interoperability interface – Put the Dashboard into a Semantic Model (Excel) Data Dictionaries and Models – Put the Semantic Model into Dynamic Case Management (Be Informed) Structured process for updating data in the dashboard 5

Put the Best Content into a Knowledge Base 6

Put the Knowledge Base into a Spreadsheet 7

Put the Spreadsheet into a Dashboard 8

Story-Pre-Summit So the first step with the Summit web site content shows how to integrate unstructured and structured data sources. The web site content is given structure and the agenda which is a table, but locked in a PDF file, is made a real table in the knowledge base and spreadsheet. The second and third steps are illustrated below in a spreadsheet and dashboard. So in this process you really are looking at and learning from the content to help answer the 3rd and 4th questions. Now I know who I want to hear present and meet at the conference to learn more to help my own work. If I had their and web addresses and slides in my knowledge base, then I would be even better prepared. Hopefully, I will be able to do that during and after the conference. You can see many examples where I have done that for other big data conferences in my blogs. I can search across the entire knowledge base for this conference since it is in one MindTouch web page and search across all of my spreadsheets and dashboards since Spotfire as a cloud tool supports that. 9

Story-Pre-Summit If I were doing this for a client with many more data sources, I would do steps 4 and 5 to complete the job. So I look forward to meeting you at the conference and adding what I learn from your presentations and our discussions to my knowledge base. I am especially interested in learning about interesting data sets and tools that I could work with and write data stories about. 10