Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAISBig Data meets Societal Challenges: Final Release of the Big Data Europe Integrator Platform
The Big Data Europe (BDE) project is presenting and releasing the final public version of its open source Integrator Platform at the Webinar scheduled on Thursday 16 November, 15:00 CET. During this Webinar, BDE’s technical team will present what the Big Data Europe Integrator Platform can do, how it does it, and how you can use it in order to derive more value from your data sets. Moreover the project’s latest achievements with regard to Semantifying the Big Data Stack will be showcased.
The Big Data Europe Integrator Platform (BDI) is specifically designed to capture, manage and process the enormous amounts of data being created on a daily basis, with the objective to derive meaningful results and make a difference to people’s lives, solving thus societal challenges by putting cutting edge technology in the hands of experts in fields other than IT.
The updated BDI platform now includes a number of additional components and innovative features. Following three years of continuous efforts by the technical team, BDI offers a production-ready toolchain for big data crunching, using open source tools like Docker and Docker Swarm in order to leverage a modular platform that can be very easily installed and used.
Big Data and Semantic Web technologies support experts who aim at advancing society
As Project Coordinator Prof. Dr. Sören Auer, Director of the Technical Information Library (TIB) and Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at the Leibniz University of Hannover, stated: “BDI synergistically integrates technology from the Big Data analytics and semantics technology realms. Especially for the societal challenges not only very large data analysis but also the semantic integration of heterogeneous data assets is of paramount importance.”
Deputy Project Coordinator Dr. Simon Scerri, Fraunhofer IAIS, adds: “BDI encapsulates the project’s major technical result: providing a free and flexible big data platform as a standard solution that can be customised to ingest a variety of input data and meet diverse objectives for maximising the value of that data. It therefore single-handedly fulfils one of the project's initial promises – to reduce the entry barrier of societal stakeholders to big data technology.”
Indeed BDI has been successfully showcased by seven pilot use-cases, addressing thus the respective 7 Societal Challenges identified by the European Commission. More specifically, work in the Societal Challenge in the domain of Food and Agriculture has focused on the needs of the agri-food community in terms of big data and the work in the Societal Challenge of Security a web tool for information extraction from heterogeneous data sources has been developed. Therefore it can be deduced that BDI constitutes the ideal solution for all organisations and institutions aiming at advancing society with the innovative use of data, including open data.
From a technical standpoint, the platform provides monitoring and visualization tools for novice users while supporting full access and control for expert users. A rich documentation is provided by wiki pages, instructions for installation, webinars, and accompanying videos on the BDE channel. BDI provides a number of ready-to-use components as docker images, while remaining extensible to new components that can be dockerized and integrated into the workflow. In this release, BDI has been enriched with the provision of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
While BDE is approaching its completion, other projects have already started not only using and maintaining BDI but also further developing the BDE toolchain. For instance, BDI components are already used by many software projects such as Proteus, onebox, project-ember.
More information:
The platform can be downloaded from https://github.com/big-data-europe
Here you can find installation instructions and watch the video of the first release.
About Big Data Europe
“Big Data Europe” addresses societal challenges with innovative data technologies. More specifically, Big Data Europe is a project within the EU’s “Horizon 2020” framework programme that aims to build a knowledge- and innovation-based society in order to strengthen the competitiveness of the European economy. Lead by Fraunhofer IAIS 15 other institutions and companies constitute the BDE consortium:
AgroKnow (GR), CESSDA (NO), National Center for Scientific Research DEMOKRITOS (GR), ERCIM/W3C (FR), ERTICO - ITS Europe (BE), European Union Satellite Centre (ES), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO (IT), Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) e.V. (DE), Kentro Ananeosimon Pigon Ke Exikonomisis Energeias (Center for Renewable Energy Sources), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (GR), The Open PHACTS Foundation (GB), Tenforce (BE), Semantic Web Company (AT), VU Amsterdam (NL) and Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (GR).