Apple Maps and the many, many layers of Big Data

Data is highly layered and nuanced, which is why what’s happening with Big Data is so fascinating. Big Data is much more than large volumes. It is all data, used to find perfect context at the perfect moment.

Today, Apple Insider reported on Apple’s application for a patent for layered maps, a way to create displays that place stratified, rich data categories atop a physical map. Those layers can be static data like places of interest or far more dynamic data, like weather. Thinking ahead, a display can represent things like sentiment in-the-moment, during an event in the form of active conversations across social media. For a business, the possibilities are enormous from crowd and traffic patterns to the exact locations of loyal customers.

This is a very, very powerful way to consume Big Data.

Big Data turned the other way

Just as we can take massive quantities of data and perform self-discovery to find meaningful patterns, the reverse is also true. We can overlay geography with the important parts of data to give locational context to patterns. The real point of Big Data isn’t to know things…it is to derive benefits from what you know. Apple gets that, and while they are a device company, Apple has shown a remarkable ability to help people consume complex information in very digestible ways.

Apple and Google have been locked in a battle over maps since Apple launched their own mapping product in 2012. This could be the way Apple surges ahead by providing remarkable context through a display, whether large or small. Context is currency of the Big Data age. It is the only way we can understand what we’ve collected and analyzed. Context is the way forward for Apple and any company that wants to succeed.

The world gets more complex, data gets larger, and Apple focuses on helping us avoid complexity and consume information. Genius.