Quarry: A user-centered big data integration platform

Obtaining valuable insights and actionable knowledge from data requires cross-analysis of domain data typically coming from various sources. Doing so, inevitably imposes burdensome processes of unifying different data formats, discovering integration paths, and all this given specific analytical nee...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Jovanovic, Petar|||0000-0003-4635-6646, Nadal Francesch, Sergi|||0000-0002-8565-952X, Romero Moral, Óscar|||0000-0001-6350-8328, Abelló Gamazo, Alberto|||0000-0002-3223-2186, Bilalli, Besim|||0000-0002-0575-2389
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/330646
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/330646
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10796-020-10001-y
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Information visualization
Big data
Data integration
Data-intensive flows
Metadata
Visualització de la informació
Macrodades
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Sistemes d'informació
Descripción
Sumario:Obtaining valuable insights and actionable knowledge from data requires cross-analysis of domain data typically coming from various sources. Doing so, inevitably imposes burdensome processes of unifying different data formats, discovering integration paths, and all this given specific analytical needs of a data analyst. Along with large volumes of data, the variety of formats, data models, and semantics drastically contribute to the complexity of such processes. Although there have been many attempts to automate various processes along the Big Data pipeline, no unified platforms accessible by users without technical skills (like statisticians or business analysts) have been proposed. In this paper, we present a Big Data integration platform (Quarry) that uses hypergraph-based metadata to facilitate (and largely automate) the integration of domain data coming from a variety of sources, and provides an intuitive interface to assist end users both in: (1) data exploration with the goal of discovering potentially relevant analysis facets, and (2) consolidation and deployment of data flows which integrate the data, and prepare them for further analysis (descriptive or predictive), visualization, and/or publishing. We validate Quarry’s functionalities with the use case of World Health Organization (WHO) epidemiologists and data analysts in their fight against Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).