Choose Your Crystal Ball

We asked experts about their favorite tools for harnessing Big Data to yield predictions. Here’s our short list of what’s trending:

SAP HANA allows you to turn a hypothesis into a question, and then query a database with real-time results. Whereas an old-school database might allow one query a week, HANA can handle several per day because its data is stored in RAM.

GEOFEEDIA helps you take geo-tagged social media posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, and Viddy and plot them on a map. This allows social media content, which you can filter by keyword, to be monitored in real time around any location of interest.

HADOOP is an open-source effort designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage and the ability to generate results quickly. Through its InnoVision directorate, NGA is defining areas in Big Data analytics to pilot in a Hadoop sandbox. This would allow analysts to analyze data without first having to go to multiple repositories based on how it was collected.

GEO-Q and GEOWAVE are among a number of NGA’s open-source projects available through its GitHub account. Geo-Q is a web infrastructure that helps crowdsource information to support disaster relief and other humanitarian assistance efforts. GeoWave is a set of software that adds multi-dimensional indexing capability to Apache Accumulo.

Feature image courtesy of SAP HANA.

Return to feature story: The Missing Pieces