Information is increasingly becoming important in our daily lives. We have become information dependents of the twenty-first century, living in an on-command, on-demand Big data world. In this era, more information is being created by individuals than by business houses. In the past, we had to stand in a queue at a railway reservation counter to book our tickets, had to visit a cash counter in a bank to do our transactions, had to arrange a get together at a physical location within our town to meet and socialize with our friends, had to visit a theater to watch a movie, and so on. We now have Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to help us do all these by sitting in front of a computer and with a few mouse clicks. Also, all these advancements are possible because we are drenched in a flood of data today. It is important to distinguish between data, information and knowledge. Data is a set of facts about events. Information is a processed set of facts that are meaningful. Knowledge is broader, deeper and richer than both data and information. Knowledge answers questions like "How".As the world is getting technology savvy, the collection and distribution of information and knowledge need special attention (Upadhyaya et al. 2006). As the volume of data being gathered and stored around the globe is exploding (due to globalization efforts) and the cost of technologies like Analytics, Machine learning, Statistics, and Networking is falling, researchers, industry professionals and policy makers are beginning to realize the potential of Big data to identify the needs of common man and provide services that can make their life better. Days are not far when we will experience applications like, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our students by getting access to their transcripts available on cloud, and correlating those grades with their online experiences; building an intelligent transportation system for a city through analysis and visualization of live and detailed road network data, etc.Beyond the transactional data used by many organizations, there exists a potential treasure trove of nontraditional, less structured data (Big data) that can be mined for useful information (Rajpathak and Narsingpurkar 2013). Today, most of the young people have twitter, facebook, linked-in, google+ accounts for their online activities. Also, people are acquainted with flickr to upload their photographs, semantria.com to see sentiment analysis or opinion mining, ebay.com to buy or sell items, and crowd sourcing tasks on Amazon.com. All these are applications of Big data. Digital information available on the Internet is increasing 10 folds every five years in a scale of Zeta-bytes. Data is now available from blogs, RFIDs, sensors, cameras, social networks, telephony, e-commerce and medical records.