Cities in the Age of the Big Data

Abstract

In the era of knowledge based economy an indispensable element of its creation is the access to information sources, resulting from the process of data analysis. Alongside development of information society, the need for access to data is growing and, alike, increases the capacity to generate new data, originating from qualitative and quantitative analyses, following the activities of various local actors. The development of information and communication technologies and accompanying expansion of access to personal computers and the Internet lead to a constant increase of computer memory capacity with simultaneous reduction of their physical size. The constant progress observed in computer memory capacity reduces the need to limit the size of data resources or the disk memory consumed by software. It is assumed that data stored in the digital universe will reach the level of 8 zettabytes by 2015 (1 zettabyte = 10003 terabyte = 10004 gigabyte) [Gantz, Reinsel, 2011, p. 3], and to 50 zettabytes by 2020 [Van Rijmenam, 2014, p. 9].