Providing Clarity on Big Data Technologies: A Structured Literature Review

The success of big data projects depends heavily on the ability to decide which technological expertise and architectures are required in such a context. However, there is confusion in scientific discourse regarding the systemization of big data technologies which exacerbates this problem. Therefore, in this paper, a structured literature review is conducted to assess the current state of the art and give an overview about big data technology classifications. It can be stated that only very limited approaches for classifications exist, which are partially incomplete or address only single aspects of big data technologies, such as the used database type. Conducting this literature review, investigations have also been made to derive possible starting points for extending existing or developing new classification approaches, which can form the basis of a future big data classification framework. Such a concept could be used to improve the decision-support for planning and managing big data projects. However, a common understanding would require unambiguous definitions of the term technology and various other expressions, which are used in the literature as a synonym today.