On Big Data and Hydroinformatics

Big data is an increasingly hot concept in the past five years in the area of computer science, e-commence, and bioinformatics, because more and more data has been collected by the internet, remote sensing network, wearable devices and the Internet of Things. The big data technology provides techniques and analytical tools to handle large datasets, so that creative ideas and new values can be extracted from them. However, the hydroinformatics research community are not so familiar with big data. This paper provides readers who are embracing the data-rich era with a timely review on big data and its relevant technology, and then points out the relevance with hydroinformatics in three aspects.