note: Placeholder entry. It is too nice a day to continue this now. More later.
I know where I want to go....I think I know...yes, I do know but that in hindsight when I get there might not be what I thought at all in the first place.
At least I know the start point. In this case it is two concepts. One being micro level the other being its extension to the macro level. The micro first being Granularity and the macro second being Big Data.
Wikipedia describes Granularity here at this link.
Wikipedia describes Big Data here at this link.
Is Wikipedia all I know? No, just my quick and dirty go to place to learn something.
If I want to get a general consensus of the two words from the internet...
(....strike the use of internet...what I really mean is the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee to be accurate and give credit where credit is due..)
then I would do a Google search of everything said about the two words on the Web.
Google on Granularity here at this link (1,660,000 hits)
Google on "Big Data here at this link (15,200,000 hits)
Wikipedia suffices. Variety in Google search hits is informative and offers a world of side trips but side trips is not where I want to go. I am easily sidetracked.
My concept of Granularity and how I want to develop that personal concept on the road to big data is the smallest discrete uniquely identified unit that I choose to work with in my creative investigation to develop my own perception of the total system. A system that goes from my chosen lowest micro level of Granularity to the the macro level of Big Data.
If I were a computer scientist I would choose to start at the binary level where the most granular thing is either the presence of something or the absence of the same thing. That is science. Engineers apply science to design and choose to work with higher level of conceptual or real granularity to begin the design of something. Builders make something based real or conceptual on the design of engineers.
I like to design and build. I just completed a gate from my deck to the back yard. Designed it in my head. Built it with my hands then painted it. I will use it for quick access to my back yard. I like to do things from start to finish entirely by myself. If I was to sail around the world I would start by chopping down the trees to make the hull, or mixing the graphite an fibers. Not sure how I would make them. Gotta start somewhere and I am not a scientist.
The prior paragraph is some personal information about myself that I make public by entry on this public accessible blog..that nobody looks at really but it is public. If this public information that I publish about myself (and all of my viewpoints in this entire blog and information intelligence deduced from my blog ) goes into a consolidated record about me to create a personal profile where all the information about me that is publicly available becomes more than the sum of its parts (getting to be a long sentence here but it is an entire stand alone If/Then thought) then where does my privacy right that may be associated with the Big Data about little me start?
Where does a personal privacy right emerge when only public information about me is all put together in my Big Data personal file?
Granularity and Big Data is a broad domain. The Problem Domain I want to focus on is one in which the micro granular is a Person and, at the macro level, Big Data is all the relational information about All Persons (Collective noun: People).
Everybody knows who and what is a "Person". Don't they? Romney does, my friend. I will define granular person as a Human Being.
The Big Data concept has been co-oped to mean a Big Data Base where individual pieces of data relating to some thing are the granular level of Big Data. Big Data is not really the term I want to use as the macro level descriptor of what I want to address on this road I am taking.
I want to call the macro level: "Big Information". However, I will use Big Data since that gets millions of hits and Big Information only thousands. Unfortunately. Data starts to mean something when it becomes information knowledge. I will try to keep that in mind even if I have to use the vernacular "Big Data" to describe it. Technically, the NSA has Big Data but what it has more correctly is Big Information capability. That is where Big Data rubber meets the Big Information Road. Where something created by Scientists, designed by Engineers, is built to do something useful for the End User. It might be more about Data at the discovery and design level but it is all about Information where the rubber meets the road. Information however also feeds back into more discovery and design as well as application.
"Big Data" and "Big Information" hits on a Google Search here at this link......just for information.
I think that where I ultimately want to go with this look at the Problem Domain of Granularity and Big Data is the integration of open access to the Information as a Commons with associated public rights. That means that the use of Big Data (Information) about People (granular Human Beings) by Big Institutions (Big People?) must observe certain rights of People to their own Personal Information.
While data and information aggregate smoothly with the objective of low friction to higher levels of conceptual structures all the way to the top of Big Data, (bottom up assembly) the reverse; top down breakdown is not so friction free. from the granular level access standpoint. As data about people goes up to Big Data information derived from Big Data about people at the granular level becomes proprietary to the owner of Big Data with some degree of right to access by People to whom their private data relate. A privacy right that might otherwise even prevent or introduce friction to the upward accumulation and use of a Person's private data/information.
It gets complicated when data about a Person is public information but when all that public information is put together at higher levels of aggregations from many sources what was public in origination accretes (or accrues since my spell checker does not like that word but it a real word) to become a very private information knowledge picture.
That is the problem in the Granularity and Big Data domain. The one I want to examine in the next blog entry. I want to examine it in terms of HTTPa that Tim Berners-Lee is proposing which caught my attention span in a prior blog entry at my blog site.
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