Who owns what?
Researchers may find it harder to ascertain who the ‘owners’ of some of these ‘big data’ are – a necessity when it comes to properly acknowledging the owner and ascertaining the legal rights over re-use. Researchers need to make best efforts to find out the legal implications of re-publishing data, or parts of data, taking into account the license brazil rcs data under which it has been published, copyright laws and where ‘fair dealing’ may or may not apply. Owners of social media data like Twitter and Facebook do have re-use terms in their small print, but these can change over time, so should always be consulted for each instance of data publication.
Our team of experts at the UK Data Service are using an Apache Hadoop cluster to store and process big data sources, to create ‘slice and dice’ services, data analysis and visualisations, and linking services. For example, the household smart meter mentioned earlier above could be linked to temperature data at regional level to look at correlations of energy usage and weather. The only way this linkage can be achieved is through the availability of sufficient metadata that includes geographical identifiers based on recognised coding schemes that are easy to match across datasets.