The Data-Intensive Survival Guide

Chapter 3: "The data-intensive survival guide", presents an overview of all of the elements of the proposed data-intensive strategy. Sufficient detail is presented for readers to understand the principles and practice that we recommend. It should also provide a good preparation for readers who choose to sample later chapters. It introduces three professional viewpoints: domain experts, data-analysis experts, and data-intensive engineers. Success depends on a balanced approach that develops the capacity of all three groups. A data-intensive architecture provides a flexible framework for that balanced approach. This enables the three groups to build and exploit data-intensive processes that incrementally step from data to results. A language is introduced to describe these incremental data processes from all three points of view. The chapter introduces ‘datascopes’ as the productized data-handling environments and ‘intellectual ramps’ as the ‘on ramps’ for the highways from data to knowledge.