'Big Data' disguises digital doubts

— -- Buzzwords don't come any bigger than "Big Data," which promises to reveal the secrets hidden within big blocks of data held by companies, governments and musty old archives.

But maybe Big Data has an Achilles' heel, some experts warn, despite its Big promises.

"The initiative we are launching today promises to transform our ability to use Big Data for scientific discovery, environmental and biomedical research, education and national security," said presidential science adviser John Holdren, announcing a $200 million effort in March by six federal agencies to uncork the power of Big Data.

Holdren compared Big Data's advent to the invention of supercomputers and the Internet. But what is Big Data really? Starting from scientists struggling to analyze massive amounts of genetic data, as they did in the Human Genome Project a decade ago, or astronomical data, such as the survey of more than 930,000 galaxies undertaken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Big Data has blossomed into a constellation of computer science approaches to handling, visualizing and blending together "big" sets of data.

For example, police forces from Honolulu to New York have looked at combinations of crime tips submitted via Facebook, Twitter and text messages to identify "hotspots" for muggings and other felonies. Amazon famously tracks masses of book purchases to suggest new buys to like-minded readers. The Defense Department hopes to weave together information from a new generation of battlefield sensors at speeds 100 times faster than today using Big Data techniques.

Such efforts have blossomed in the Facebook era, where poking through troves of customer data is seen as the key to unlocking sales. In medicine, a two-day " Health Datapalooza" held this month in the nation's capital drew together federal officials, former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Wired Magazine executive editor Thomas Goetz, to talk health data. If your gene map can be compared instantly to the genomes of millions of other folks in coming decades, for example, the hope is that medicine finely tuned to your medical needs will result.

A Science journal study last year introduced the notion of " culturomics," using Big Data — Google's millions of searchable digitized books in its case — to reveal, "linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000."

Data. Data. Data. So much of it is out there, tracked from the moment you look up a dentist on a website, take a trip through a highway tollbooth to sit in the chair, pay your bill at the reception desk and post your toothache experience afterward on Facebook. Can an ad for a toothbrush be far from your in-box?