Most of us are familiar with the huge quantity of cybersecurity publications from the National Institute for Standards and Technology, but they have a standardization role that reaches far beyond security. A prime example that many of us might find useful is the NIST Big Data interoperability Framework (NBDIF). Built as a vendor-neutral, technology- and infrastructure-independent ecosystem; it can enable Big Data stakeholders (e.g. data scientists, researchers, etc.) to utilize the best available analytics tools to process and derive knowledge through the use of standard interfaces between swappable architectural components. It is a series of 10 NIST Special Publications:

NBDIF V3.0 Final Version

  1. NIST SP 1500-1r2  -- Volume 1: Definitions
2. NIST SP 1500-2r2  -- Volume 2: Taxonomies
3. NIST SP 1500-3r2  -- Volume 3: Use Case & Requirements
4. NIST SP 1500-4r2  -- Volume 4: Security and Privacy
5. NIST SP 1500-5    -- Volume 5: Architectures White Paper Survey
6. NIST SP 1500-6r2  -- Volume 6: Reference Architecture
7. NIST SP 1500-7r2  -- Volume 7: Standards Roadmap
8. NIST SP 1500-9r1  -- Volume 8: Reference Architecture Interface
9. NIST SP 1500-10r1 -- Volume 9: Modernization and Adoption

All found at https://bigdatawg.nist.gov/V3_output_docs.php. And as always with everything from NIST (since our tax dollars paid for this), it’s free.

IBM has made a large variety of educational resources available for free in the areas of big data, touching both data management and data analytics. This includes both pre-defined learning tracks and individual courses. Most courses take 3 to 8 hours to complete and can be entirely done using either open source tools or the resources on the IBM Bluemix cloud, available though our Software! portal at http://www.itm.iit.edu/software/webstore.html. These courses are a great supplement for students in the MIS or Data Management curriculum who want to build their knowledge and abilities in analytics and big data management using tools like Spark, Hadoop, Seahorse, Jupyter, R, Rstudio, System T, Watson, and Scala. To access the courses, go to https://bigdatauniversity.com/.