Walt Disney, one of the world’s largest and most highly valued companies according to the prestigious Forbes magazine, has developed a Big Data system for the collection and analysis of visitor activity data at its theme parks, which has so far been implemented at its Orlando park in Florida. Every year 100 million people visit its theme parks using its attractions, buying Disney products, eating in its restaurants and sleeping in its hotels. Thus, the activity of these visitors can result in a large amount of data if properly recorded and stored. Analysis of the immense volume of data generated on a daily basis can provide Disney with solid knowledge for strategic decision making, thus helping to improve its theme parks by making them more productive, accessible and therefore profitable, offering visitors what they need at any given moment.

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This week, 3 different initiatives have emerged in the pharmaceutical industry to share their information.

• The most ambitious one has been the Data Sphere Project, which was announced a few days ago, where clinical diagnostic data will be shared for cancer research. Right now the number of datasets is small, but there is already a list of companies willing to contribute information, among others, Bayer or Pfizer. The main objective of this project is to accelerate the discovery and development of effective treatments for the disease.  A professional researcher profile is required for access, but access to the data is free of charge. The technology used to build the system is SAS, which will host the service and provide analysis.

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It is now announced the Call for Papers for the second edition of the International Workshop on Modeling and Management of Big Data (MoBiD 2014), which includes topics such as Big Data, Big Data Analytics, Conceptual modeling approaches for…