A knowledge-based platform for Big Data analytics based on publish/subscribe services and stream processing

Big Data analytics is considered an imperative aspect to be further improved in order to increase the operating margin of both public and private enterprises, and represents the next frontier for their innovation, competition, and productivity. Big Data are typically produced in different sectors of the above organizations, often geographically distributed throughout the world, and are characterized by a large size and variety. Therefore, there is a strong need for platforms handling larger and larger amounts of data in contexts characterized by complex event processing systems and multiple heterogeneous sources, dealing with the various issues related to efficiently disseminating, collecting and analyzing them in a fully distributed way. In such a scenario, this work proposes a way to overcome two fundamental issues: data heterogeneity and advanced processing capabilities. We present a knowledge-based solution for Big Data analytics, which consists in applying automatic schema mapping to face with data heterogeneity, as well as ontology extraction and semantic inference to support innovative processing. Such a solution, based on the publish/subscribe paradigm, has been evaluated within the context of a simple experimental proof-of-concept in order to determine its performance and effectiveness. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.