ITL Hosts 2nd NIST Big Data Workshop

On June 1-2, 2017, ITL hosted the 2nd NIST Big Data Public Working Group (NBD-PWG) workshop with the theme Towards a Standard Ecosystem for Big Data Applications and Analytics. The event was well attended with over 120 in-person and 70-plus webcast representatives from industry, academia, and government.

Established four years ago with the help of 172 participants, the NBD-PWG has grown into a large community of interest encompassing five subgroups with eight co-chairs and over 850 participants from industry, academia and government. The goal is to create a consensus-based extensible NIST Big Data Interoperability Framework (NBDIF) which is vendor-neutral and independent of technology and infrastructure/ecosystem. The NBDIF will enable Big Data stakeholders (e.g., data scientists, researchers, etc.) to utilize the best available analytics tools to process and derive knowledge from big data using standard interfaces between swappable architectural components.

The workshop focused on four major areas: (a) NBDIF Version 2 Overview – consensus approach to establish an interoperable ecosystem for Big Data applications and analytics; (b) Big Data application challenges – how a standard ecosystem can overcome Big Data applications development challenges from major government programs and initiatives; (c) Big Data analytics challenges – how a standard ecosystem may provide reusable, deployable, and operational analytics tools from major government chief data scientists/officers; and (d) Explore Exascale Big Data Analytics and Systems.

The first day of the workshop featured NBDIF Version 2 presentations of eight volumes draft documents with breakout group discussions with government leaders sharing their Big Data application programs/initiatives challenges and exploring how a standard Big Data ecosystem may help. The second day focused on NBDIF Version 2 breakout reports from NBD-PWG subgroups co-chairs with selected chief data scientists/officers from major government agencies to share their Big Data analytics challenges. An approach to Exascale Big Data Analytics and Systems was also presented and discussed.

The next milestone is to publish the NBDIF Version 2 documents as a NIST Special Publication within the next six months, including technical editing, external comments, and internal review.For more details about the NBD-PWG and the Big Data Workshop, see https://bigdatawg.nist.gov and https://bigdatawg.nist.gov/workshop2.php.