Data, data, everywhere you go you are surrounded by numbers, text, and statistics staggering in their sheer volume. We need huge databases just to store all that access, and infrastructures to access it all easily, but this is not necessarily the biggest problem of a growing data puzzle.

What is? Usability. One of the biggest problems with databases full to the brim, for the user, is the contextual application of bits and bites. It is not the mass of data that is so problematic, it is the processes and interconnectedness of the sometimes distant pieces, even the puzzle pieces in proximity. Mark Madsen, President of Third Nature – noted emerging technologies consultants – discusses this aspect in his “Mythology of Big Data” talk at a recent O’Reilly conference.

Corporate data, individual data, revolutionary uses of data, bad data, voluminous data, you may know a lot about the magnitude of all those digital imprints, but how much do you know about the ways all that information can be used, what ancillary effects there are, what the future may hold? Maybe the questions created with ProProfs’ Quiz Maker below will enlighten you some, or at worst end up as what Madsen suggested is “very expensive trivia.”

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Did you find out some things you never knew about the tidal wave of data flow? You may also be interested to know that there are currently nearly 200,000 jobs needing filling to meet the demand Big Data makes on industry. That’s right, data analysts to server architecture engineers to the night watchman, Big Data jobs are one of the fastest growing fields.

Along those lines, the people of Big Data make the tech news nearly every day. For instance, Gilad Elbaz, Founder of Factual, has invested in over 30 startups geared to collect and analyze data. There’s a lot more to Big Data than the occasional Facebook or Google security issue or privacy one you read about. Siri use or how many times you play Angry Birds, the whole world is now one big data problem, and solution.

And the answers to your’s and my questions just may be…. out there.

Credits: Quiz photos via author arrangement with Fotolia.

Watch the YouTube video of Mark Madsen