Matthew Fontaine Maury: The 19th-Century Forerunner of Big Data

Computer speed and web interconnections are allowing us to manage and process data at an unprecedented level. In the last two decades we have discovered new paradigms for extracting valuable information from such data and it is very likely that this process is only at its beginning. These paradigms have resulted into market and financial forecasts of a huge economic importance and the companies that exploit them are creating new powerful empires, which navigate in often-unexplored seas of opportunities where regulations are still weak and contrasts with nations frequently arise.