The amount of data being digitally collected and stored is vast and expanding rapidly. As a result, the science of data management and analysis is also advancing to enable organizations to convert this vast resource into information and knowledge that helps them achieve their objectives. Computer scientists have invented the term big data to describe this evolving technology. Big data has been successfully used in astronomy (eg, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of telescopic information), retail sales (eg, Walmart's expansive number of transactions), search engines (eg, Google's customization of individual searches based on previous web data), and politics (eg, a campaign's focus of political advertisements on people most likely to support their candidate based on web searches).