What is a semantic layer? That’s a good question, but let’s first explain semantics. The way that I explained it to my data science students years ago was like this. In the early days of web search engines, those engines were primarily keyword search engines

When we were in school and were given a problem to solve, we usually stopped working on the problem as soon as we found the answer and we recorded that answer on our paper. This might be a fair approach for elementary school assignments, but that approach is not good in higher education or in life. Unfortunately, many people continue this learned behavior into adulthood, at the university and/or on their jobs. Consequently, these people miss new opportunities for learning, discovery, recognition, and advancement.

When we get local with our big data by concentrating on the behavior of objects in smaller localized units, we have the potential for significant discoveries from those small data subsets. Therefore, don’t get distracted by all of the talk about big data’s bigness. You can go local with big data, and get big results from small data.