Big Data

The Big Data Interagency Working Group (BD IWG) was formed in 2011 to coordinate Federal BD R&D across 17 participating agencies to enable extraction of knowledge and insights of large, diverse, real-time data for an effective analysis, decision making, and discovery. Guided by the Federal Big Data Research and Development Strategic Plan, the IWG focuses on the capabilities to collect, store, access, analyze, reuse, and provide governance for big data that will accelerate scientific discovery and innovation, lead to new areas of research and inquiry, provide vast resources to enhance national security, and create new capabilities that support economic growth and novel solutions to pressing national issues.

Strategic Priorities

• Support the foundational research, innovative tools, and methodologies that maximize the use of large-scale data resources to solve priority challenges in areas such as U.S. security, economy, health, and climate change.
• Supports ethics, security, and privacy in innovation by advancing the reliability, accuracy, performance, generalizability, and transparency of data-driven discovery and decision making.
• Facilitates the sharing, discoverability, interoperability, and reusability of diverse data that are scalable and agile enough to meet the needs of innovation and support open science and community-engaged R&D.
• Enables time-sensitive data-driven decision making through scalable high-performance analytics ecosystems and large-scale data resources.
• Builds a diverse multigeneration workforce necessary to develop, support, and use all aspects of big data.
• Transitions R&D to community practice through innovative partnerships.