Toward Big Data Immutability

Today's blog continues yesterday's discussion of Big Data Immutability.Big Data managers must do what seems to be impossible; they must learn how to modify data without altering the original content.  The trick is accomplished with identifiers and time-stamps attached to event data (and yes, it's all discussed at greater length in my book, Principles of Big Data: Preparing, Sharing, and Analyzing Complex Information).In today's blog, let's just focus on the concept of a time-stamp. Temporal events must be given a time-stamp indicating the time that the event occurred, using a standard measurement for time. The time-stamp must be accurate, persistent, and immutable. Time-stamps are not tamper-proof. In many instances, changing a recorded time residing in a file or data set requires nothing more than viewing the data on your computer screen and substituting one date and time for another.  Dates that are automatically recorded, by your computer system, can also be altered. Operating systems permit users to reset the system date and time.  Because the timing of events can be altered, scrupulous data managers employ a trusted time-stamp protocol by which a time-stamp can be verified.Here is a description of how a trusted time-stamp protocol might work.  You have just created a message, and you need to document that the message existed on the current date.  You create a one-way hash on the message (a fixed-length sequence of seemingly random alphanumeric ch...
Source: Specified Life - Category: Pathologists Source Type: blogs