Petabytes of high-dimensional data are nowadays acquired by diverse sensing modalities and sources. Mining and cross correlating these heterogeneous data sources can unlock new insights, accelerate new market opportunities and lead to innovative products. In the smart cities industry, for example, conventional structured datasets can be cross-correlated with private big data sources, such as web search engine’s data, commercial vendors’ data sets, mobile positioning data, social media data (Twitter, Youtube) as well as open data. Leveraging the potential of vast corpora of data can help to effectively cope with new challenges.