Everyone contributes to Big Data in one form or another.  If you love posting on social media sites, then you contribute to Big Data in social media.  Almost everything we do on a daily basis has something to do with big data and now, the government is interested in figuring out how to best use big data.

In SiliconANGLE.tv’s NewsDesk, Kirsten Feledy is joined by Wikibon Big Data Analyst Jeff Kelly in figuring out why the government is interested in big data and what’s their plan of action.

According to Kelly, the government is pushing through a $200 billion research initiative around big data earlier this year, a good start for any project.  The government also released a map of how big data will be incorporated into major projects, and how agencies will get started on this big data initiative.

Feledy asked what the government meant by their statement, “The impact of the Big Data has the potential to be as profound as the development of the Internet itself,” in the report they published.  Kelley notes how big data isn’t being utilized to its full potential, and that’s what the government wants to do in order to better serve the people.

There’s already a government agency fully immersed in big data, and that’s NASA.  They’ve been collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data for years in order to understand how the world works, looking at things like weather patterns or climate changes.  This helps people understand what contributes to global warming and what people can do at the individual and community levels.

Kelly also notes that the government is working on big data projects related to transportation and education, but there’s no telling which of the projects the government is giving the highest priority.  For Kelly, if he was to choose, he’d prioritize education – knowing how to improve on it and understand the trends that happen in education so adjustments can be made towards improvements.

Big data is used in a lot of ways by different companies, and you might not even know it’s at work.  According to Kelly, one example is social media sites: when they suggest people you know, that’s big data at work.  It crunches billions and billions of data points to uncover connections among people you know.

Banks also leverage big data to stop fraudulent transactions, and even healthcare is embracing the use of big data in order to keep track of their patients.  Kelly sees how the government can use big data in understanding and tracking the needs of the people, improving city layouts, services and spending.

To watch the full interview, see below.