Page 63 - Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities

44 Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities What Is Big Data? 45

Curation

One of the major challenges facing transportation with respect to current data,
never mind Big Data, is to have an organization-wide awareness of what data is
available and where it is located. Today, there are automated tools available to
assist in the curation process and provide support for master data management
and the definition of data governance techniques. One of the important ele-
ments of data creation lies in the definition and specification of who can have
access to the data and what permissions they have to alter the data.
In order to emphasize the importance of addressing this challenge effec-
tively, here are some anecdotes from the field. The Florida Department of Trans-
portation provided the following real-life stories in a recent presentation [9]:

• A study on the feasibility of a new road was completed by a project team.
Six months later another project team performed the same study. They
did not know of the existence of the first study and the associated data.
• The project team was delayed and moving on to the next phase of a
road project as they were unable to locate survey data. Due to schedule
requirements the team had to repeat the survey and recollect the data.
• A project to resurface a particular stretch of road was completed. One
month later, a new street lighting system was installed on the same
stretch of road, requiring that the road surface be excavated.

These stories capture the essence of data curation and the challenges it
poses from a transportation point of view. There is little point in investing re-
sources for data collection if the organization is not aware of the data’s existence
and cannot access the data in a timely manner. These insights led the Florida
Department of Transportation to embark on a major program to equip the
organization with the latest data management technology.

Search
To be useful to transportation professionals, search tools and techniques must
be intuitive and relatively simple to understand. It is important that the empha-
sis is placed on the use and value of the tools rather than the need to develop
skills and expertise to make use of them. Users have grown accustomed to the
power of Google, and this provides excellent access to search the World Wide
Web for data. It is essential that the tools used to search big data also feature
these intuitive capabilities. The sophistication of search tools is growing, en-
abling the presentation of more precise results rather than simply a list of pos-
sibilities. This is not only relevant to the World Wide Web but should also be
applied to internal big data systems.