The goal of this chapter is to shed light on different types of big data applications needed in various industries including healthcare, transportation, energy, banking and insurance, digital media and e-commerce, environment, safety and security, telecommunications, and manufacturing. In response to the problems of analyzing large-scale data, different tools, techniques, and technologies have bee developed and are available for experimentation.

The rapid development of digital technologies, IoT products and connectivity platforms, social networking applications, video, audio and geolocation services has created opportunities for collecting/accumulating a large amount of data. While in the past corporations used to deal with static, centrally stored data collected from various sources, with the birth of the web and cloud services, cloud computing is rapidly overtaking the traditional in-house system as a reliable, scalable and cost-efective IT solution.

Although each government in Europe with their public administration services can be treated as a big data ecosystem, the opportunities of interconnecting, integrating and processing the data on EU level presents a real challenge nowadays. Discussions on public benefit of integrating and opening the data can be found in our previous work, where we examine the use of Linked Data Approach in European e-Government Systems. 

Big Data technologies are often used in domains where data is generated, stored and processes with rates that cannot be efficiently processed by one computer. One of those domains is definitely the domain of energy. Here, the processes of energy generation, transmission, distribution and use have to be concurrently monitored and analyzed in order to assure system stability without brownouts or blackouts. The transmission systems (grids) that transport electric energy are in general very large and robust infrastructures that are accompanied with an abundance of monitoring equipment.