Big Data Wave
February 14, 2017
Big Data is an ongoing trend and is presented as key capability for small and big organizations to drive their digital business. But Big Data is not only based on new technologies. Instead, there are base technologies like structured databases, business intelligence, or analytical applications that are precursors of that boom in the digital era.
The awesome community provides a curation of big data technologies with well discussed categories. Each technology will be selected, discussed, and assigned to a specific category by a community. Readers can get inisghts of their general application and the richness of upcoming big data technologies. We wanted to show the continous development of those technologies that are related to the term Big Data. Retrieving the commit history regarding changes, maintaining bug fixes, or new features was necessary to show the progress of each technology.
All commits by contributors were displayed through a wave visualization over time. This visualization shows some peaks in several months but also technologies with an increasing or decreasing development over time. A general lifecycle pattern is not visible over all technologies because of their community-driven nature.
The development of open source technologies is more organic and depends on the contributors that can be independent developers, companies, or public organizations.
The design of a multiline chart allows the detection of similiarities but also outliers compared to a single consolidated line. The 2.5D perspective places all lines on a plane view and enlarges the room visually. The fine colored lines through a linear gradient from white to blue was used to emphasize changes regarding each technology.
Changes are more visible with this color technique and reduce the overlapping effect. In summary, the wave visualization provides a plane view of over 200 big data technologies and their made progress and tells a compelling history of big data technologies.
