Other than the fact that the title of the course contains both Business Intelligence AND Data Analytics, these two concepts seem like separate things, right?

Well that’s what this week’s discussion is going to find out.

While we won’t address data visualization in depth in this course, data visualization is never very far from any discussion of data analytics, so I’d like everyone (ALL students, not just the initial post group) to get acquainted with Google’s Ngram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams.

Basically the Ngram Viewer allows you to see a graph of the occurrence of a given word or phrase over a specified period of years in the entire corpus of books contained in the Google Books collection.  You can also enter several words or phrases to compare the evolution of usage over time.  The default (sample) ngram on the day I visited was a comparison of

Albert Einstein,Sherlock Holmes,Frankenstein

which resulted in

Your tasks and the discussion topic(s) this week:

1. ALL students should use Ngram and try various combinations of

• business intelligence,
• data analytics,
• data science.

You  might try allied terms like

• data analysis,
• big data.

Be sure to change the years, you’ll definitely want to include through to the current year and I think you’ll quickly find that years before 1900 (sometimes later) don’t show much.  Think about what the graph is showing you in terms of the usage of these various terms.  Be aware that even if you enter the current year, Ngram may change that year depending on the data available (currently, it seems to ‘default’ to 2008 as the most recent year available).

2. INITIAL POST GROUP: in addition to the Ngram exercise, members of the initial post group should also conduct a web search for definitions of at least business intelligence and data analytics.  I’m sure you’ll find more than a few sites willing to compare the two.   The topic this week:

Compare and contrast the terms business intelligence and data analytics.  That is, how are they similar, how are they different?

You should include in your initial post a brief discussion of the Ngram findings AND a brief discussion of your search for definitions.