Abstract
Today, big data is considered an important area in IT and business fields. Big data is the driving force behind the effective running and competitiveness of several companies and organizations. Based on a research literature survey, there is a lack of standard definition and agreed upon characteristics for big data from scientific and business perspectives. This paper provides a review of big data definitions by various researchers and attempts to standardize a definition. In doing so, the paper identifies some issues related to big data definition and characteristics as well as raise some research questions. The paper categorizes these characteristics in terms of those relevant to big data versus those that related to processing and tools of big data. It is expected that the work presented in this paper will contribute to better alignment of big data terminology with its characteristics by various researchers, and it will provide a standard set of characteristics for the big data.