In 2008 , nobody was really talking about Big Data – but the financial crash led to more stringent regulatory requirements for banks to manage the sensitive information they possessed . Meanwhile , data governance firm Collibra was formed out of the University of Belgium ’ s research into semantic technology . CEO and co-founder Felix Van de Maele explains : “ We were researching how to bring domain experts together and help figure out what data really means , because semantic technology is about how you define data in a way that it can be understood not just by people , but also by computers .”