Big data refers to data whose amount is so big that current mainstream software tools are unable to, within a reasonable time, capture, manage, handle and reorganise into information that enables more active business decision-making. Big data is characterised by 4'V's: volume, velocity, variety and veracity.

Big data has become a popular concept that players in the computer industry are competing to grasp, and has even attracted the attention of the business and financial communities. If it can be said that IoT has provided the source of data and that cloud computing has provided channels to data storage and access, then big data can be understood as lending effective help to data application and decision-making, and big data has therefore become the 'inner soul technology' to IoT and cloud computing.

In IoT, with the widespread use of sensors and the wild popularity of mobile devices, sensors, the total amount of electronic information has seen an explosive growth worldwide. According to statistics from MIIT, the Chinese IOT industry was already worth more than 230 billion yuan in 2011, of which the sensor equipment market represented more than 90 billion yuan⁴. In the era of IoT, data can be divided into sensor data and social networking data. Currently, the amount of network data is still greater than the amount of data sensed by sensors. However, with the growing popularity of sensing devices and the gradual centralisation of sensing data, it is expected by 2015, the amount of sensing data will begin to exceed that of network data, and will eventually outgrow it by ten to twenty times⁵.

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To realise the development of the IoT big data industry, work in the following three levels is necessary: First, solving time and cost issues that hinder the large-scale promotion of the IoT t through the establishment of a platform, a set of standards and economies of scale; secondly, solving the issues of value discovery and value re-creation encountered when putting IoT to use through the accumulation, sharing and analysis research techniques of big data; and finally, solving the issue of sustainable development of the industry through the reconstruction of the value chain to provide the required services for each participant in application⁶.

6中國科學院自動化研究所,高科技與產業 化,第 204 期,2013 年 5 月號,頁 66- 69。