Next Inflection in Big Data

In O'Reilly: 

Data analytics over the past 25 years

As the volume of data has grown over the past 25 years, data comprehension for decision-making has consisted of the same two steps: creating the data warehouse and understanding the contents within the data warehouse.

The data warehouse and all its incarnations—enterprise data warehouse, data mart, and so on—is essentially an infrastructure of curated data. This data may come from a single data source (e.g., the database of a CRM application) or by integrating a variety of data sources (e.g., integrating the database of a CRM application with a database containing the social media interactions of each customer in the CRM database). This data may be structured (e.g., currency data describing the amount paid by each customer), unstructured (e.g., notes about each interaction between a customer and a service employee in free text form), or semi-structured (e.g., log data generated by a network router). Curated data is data that, once captured, is cleaned, tagged, and profiled both automatically and, more often than people would like to think, manually. ... "