Big Data Challenges for Geoinformatics, Geoinformatics and Geostatistics: An Overview.

It has been said that scientific research is now entering a ‘fourth paradigm’. While the earlier paradigms are characterised by experimentation and reasoning, the latest approaches are strongly driven by the availability of data at an unprecedented scale, and by the computational resources with which to extract the maximum value. Perhaps the classic exemplar discipline is bioinformatics, in which the human genome project has allowed a complete representation of the micro-level components and interactions which make up our physical bodies.