A look at the phenomenon of Human Generated Big Data, the petabytes and exabytes of structured and unstructured data that are currently being generated by users and organizations internationally. Is Big Data going to be another oil rush with a few winners and many losers or will it enrich all of us?
Human generated content is comprised of all the files and e-mails that we create every day, all the presentations, word processing documents, spread sheets, audio files and other documents our employers ask us to produce hour-by-hour. These are the files that take up the vast majority of digital storage space in most organizations — they are kept for significant amounts of time and they have huge amounts of metadata associated with them. Human generated content is huge, and its metadata is even bigger. Metadata is the information about a file: who might have created it, what type of file it is, what folder it is stored in, who has been reading it and who has access to it. The content and metadata together make up human generated big data.