Webinar series: exploring big data

The enormous volume and complexity of data that is being collected by government departments, businesses and other organisations represents a significant resource within the UK. These 'big data' create numerous opportunities for driving research and development, increasing productivity and transforming public and private sector organisations.

As part of the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) Big Data Network, the UK Data Service has established a dedicated big data team to enable researchers to make the most of these data for knowledge exchange and impact and is holding a series of webinars about big data. The webinars will introduce the Hadoop environment for large datasets and showcase some of the research projects from the ESRC funded Big Data Research Centres.

Webinars on the Hadoop environment for big data

New skills are needed to fully harness the power of big data. In fact, researchers need different tools for processing and analysis than when dealing with traditional, smaller datasets.

Three webinars will introduce the Hadoop environment for storing and manipulating large datasets:

• Have you heard of Hadoop but don’t know what it is or what it does? Or do you know that Hadoop is used to store very large datasets but you don’t know what it can do or why it might be relevant to you? What is Hadoop? - 23 February
• Hive is a package that works with Hadoop that allows users to manipulate very large datasets, find out more about Hive and why you might want to  use it. What is Hive? - 22 March
• Spark might be considered as a one-stop tool for big data processing, providing data manipulation facilities to slice and dice datasets as well as statistical functionality and visualisation capabilities to present your results. What is Spark? - 19 April

Webinars showcasing research from the Big Data Research Centres

The ESRC has invested in three Business and Local Government Data Research Centres to make data routinely collected by business and local government organisations accessible for research, knowledge exchange and impact. These are: Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC), the ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre and the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC). The UK Data Service has organised three webinars to showcase the research projects being undertaken by the Centres.

Presented by researchers from the CDRC, two research webinars will showcase work on the impact of online shopping on the UK high street and an exploration of diet and nutrition in children using geodemographic classifications.

The impact of online shopping on the UK high street - 3 March
Exploring diet and obesity in children using geodemographic classifications - 6 April

Researchers from the UBDC will introduce the Integrated Multimedia City Data project, a data collection involving a range of sources including a household survey and life logging sensors to explore social aspects of the urban environment in the Glasgow area.

Linking multimedia city data - 12 April