Big data is not just data that are big. In the sense of data load, "big data" has been there for quite a while in Internet, on which the entire search industry was based and developed. The current buzz word big data is different, it is innately associated with posters' background and social network, it represents data from social media perspective. That makes the big data a gold mine, waiting to be mined for intelligence as well as opportunities.  The area of data mining is fairly mature.  Data mining from structured data of consumers' behaviour, combined with their background and demographic information, has been put to practical use for some time now and is proven to be very powerful for target ads and marketing.  Sentiment mining on natural language text from social media big data can be regarded as a natural extension of data mining.  Due to its open-endedness, the potential is even greater.  When used properly, the sentiment intelligence mined from big data is beneficial to both businesses and consumers.  The related innovation can be revolutionary in changing the ways businesses interact with consumers and make better products and services to satisfy the consumers.  

所谓大数据，实际上是社会媒体火热以后的专指，所以已经与用户背景相关联，而不是搜索引擎从开放互联网搜罗来的混杂集合。没有社会媒体及其用户社会网络作为背景，纯粹从量上看，“大数据”早就存在了，它催生了搜索产业。但那不是如今的 buzz word，如今的大数据与社会媒体密不可分。当然，数据挖掘领域把用户信息和消费习惯的数据结合起来，已经有很多成果和应用。自然语言的大数据可以看作是那个应用的继续，从术语上说就是，text mining （from social media big data）是 data mining 的自然延伸。

【置顶：立委科学网博客NLP博文一览（定期更新版）】