Towards Differentiating Business Intelligence, Big Data, Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery

Abstract. Confusion, ambiguity and misunderstanding of the concepts and terminology regarding different approaches concerned with analysing massive data sets (Business Intelligence, Big Data, Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery) was identified as a significant issue faced by many academics, fellow researchers, industry professionals and domain experts. In that context, a need to critically evaluate these concept and approaches focusing on their similarities, differences and relationships was identified as useful for further research and industry professionals. In this position paper, we critically review these four approaches and produce a framework, which provides visual representation of the relationship between them to effectively support their identification and easier differentiation