The elephant in the room: getting value from Big Data

Big Data, and its 4 Vs – volume, velocity, variety, and veracity – have been at the forefront of societal, scientific and engineering discourse. Arguably the most important 5th V, value, is not talked about as much. How can we make sure that our data is not just big, but also valuable? WebDB 2015 has as its theme “Freshness, Correctness, Quality of Information and Knowledge on the Web”. The workshop attracted 31 submissions, of which the best 9 were selected for presentation at the workshop, and for publication in the proceedings. To set the stage, we have interviewed several prominent members of the data management community, soliciting their opinions on how we can ensure that data is not just available in quantity, but also in quality. In this interview Serge Abiteboul, Oren Etzioni, Divesh Srivastava with Luna Dong, and Gerhard Weikum shared with us their motivation for doing research in the area of data quality, and discussed their current work and their view on the future of the field. This interview appeared as a SIGMOD Blog article.