This course is about scalable approaches to processing large amounts of information (terabytes and even petabytes). We focus mostly on MapReduce, which is presently the most accessible and practical means of computing at this scale, but will discuss other approaches as well.
This diagram depicts a spectrum of information sharing capabilities. Moving from lower right to upper left of the diagram, we see that more expressive forms of metadata and semantic modeling encompass the simpler forms, and extend their capabilities. From