I like putting faces to names.

Steve Lohr did the research and wrote an article about the origin of the term Big Data in The New York Times. I couldn't resist the temptation to put faces to the names. Right or wrong, all the facts are from his article.

His first step in the research was to contact Fred R. Shapiro

Fred R. Shapiro is a world-recognized authority on quotations and on reference in general. He edited the award-winning Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations.

But Mr. Shapiro couldn’t find anything … crisp and definitive. The term Big Data is so generic that the hunt for its origin was not just an effort to find an early reference to those two words being used together. Instead, the goal was the early use of the term that suggests its present connotation — that is, not just a lot of data, but different types of data handled in new ways.

Tracing the origins of Big Data points to the evolution in the field of etymology, according to Mr. Shapiro. The Yale researcher began his word-hunting nearly 35 years ago, as a student at the Harvard Law School, poring through the library stacks.

Next he was contacted by Francis X. Diebold

Meanwhile, Francis X. Diebold, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, got in touch and even wrote a paper, with the mildly tongue-in-cheek title, “I Coined the Term ‘Big Data’ ”. Mr. Diebold staked a claim based on his paper, “Big Data Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting,” presented in 2000 and published in 2003. But, he later said that his follow-up inquiries proved to be “a journey of increasing humility”!

Important piece of information came from Douglas Laney

Douglas Laney is a veteran data analyst at Gartner. Doug Laney is a research vice president for Gartner Research, where he covers business analytics solutions and projects, performance management, and data-governance-related issues.

His said the father of the term Big Data might well be John Mashey, who was the chief scientist at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.

John Mashey it was!

John R. Mashey was the chief scientist at Silicon Graphics. He gave hundreds of talks to small groups in the middle and late 1990s to explain the concept and, of course, pitch Silicon Graphics products. Here are the slides of one such talk -  “Big Data and the Next Wave of Infrastress” in 1998. This is what he had to say …

…I was using one label for a range of issues, and I wanted the simplest, shortest phrase to convey that the boundaries of computing keep advancing…

Udayan Banerjee on Google+

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