Big data science visualizations have evolved from the use of proprietary data (past), to difficult-to-obtain-and-use big data (present), to the hope that business, finance, media, and government big data will be more readily available and useable in the future.

That future appears a ways off, however, given my experience with several recent projects and judging from some of the presentations at the just-concluded O’Reilly Strata Conference.

The Strata Conference is billed as the home of data science, that brings together practitioners, researchers, IT leaders and entrepreneurs to discuss big data, Hadoop, analytics, visualization and data markets.

I was especially interested in learning more about public domain data sets and how far they’ve evolved in their ability to to be used.

One way to look at that evolution is through an analysis of content from the past three Strata conferences, looking at the number of presentations by category. I was motivated to do this in part because of a previous story I read that government, real estate, and manufacturing had the highest value potential for big data in the future. Keep reading →