About the research
It is only in the past decade that ‘big data’ or ‘new forms of data’ from sources like social media, digital sensors, financial and administrative transactions have become available as data commodities for the social scientist. The panacea of big data has led to a focus on developing solutions for powerful analytics rather than sustainable and safe solutions for data curation and delivery. The UK Data Service has expertise on data provenance and trustworthiness, ethical and legal entitlements, structure and quality, and is working to deliver solutions across the whole of the big data life cycle. A first set of case studies has focussed on household energy research, an area that demands huge amounts of data and computationally challenging storage and analyses, as well as increased disclosure risks that come with data linkage. Solutions of scale for researchers in this field are needed for data exploration, analysis, visualisation and data linkage.