Over the past decade, the idea of ‘big data’ has become a focus of global interest, attracting the attention of academics, governments and industries. Though the term first appeared in the 1990s, it did not attract the attention of the mainstream media and the wider geography community until 2011. This was when big data analysis was reportedly used to locate the terrorist Osama bin Laden after traditional intelligence operations had failed to find him. Since then, big data have been widely used in issues like climate-change assessment, disease surveillance, disaster response and monitoring critical infrastructures.
The principles of big data are not new (meteorologists such as the Met Office, for example, have arguably been using big data to predict the weather for decades). However, the use of big data has started to gain widespread popularity due to:
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