Big Data: He Who Owns The Past Controls The Future

Throughout the ages humans have felt a compelling need to record information about themselves or the world around them. From the prehistoric cave paintings depicting humans hunting, to early Egyptian stone-carved hieroglyphics and ancient painted pottery, our ancestors left information for posterity even before a sophisticated writing system was developed. We know a great deal about the past from the information that has been passed on over thousands of years. Unfortunately, valuable records have also not survived man's propensity for mindless destruction and much knowledge has been lost to history such as the libraries at Alexandria, Antioch, Granada and Baghdad. Still, where gaps in historical knowledge existed, scholars have attempted to chronicle the past with whatever fragments were available; unsurprisingly, not without subjectivity but no less admirably. Indeed, when one considers that some ancient sources were written hundreds of years after the event, it would