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Handling big data: research challenges and future directions

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Abstract

Today, an enormous amount of data is being continuously generated in all walks of life by all kinds of devices and systems every day. A significant portion of such data is being captured, stored, aggregated and analyzed in a systematic way without losing its “4V” (i.e., volume, velocity, variety, and veracity) characteristics. We review major drivers of big data today as well the recent trends and established platforms that offer valuable perspectives on the information stored in large and heterogeneous data sets. Then, we present a classification of some of the most important challenges when handling big data. Based on this classification, we recommend solutions that could address the identified challenges, and in addition we highlight cross-disciplinary research directions that need further investigation in the future.

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Notes

  1. IDC: http://www.emc.com/leadership/digital-universe/2014iview/executive-summary.htm.

  2. http://www.diabeticlink.org/.

  3. http://hadoop.apache.org/.

  4. http://www.pentaho.com/product/big-data-analytics.

  5. https://mahout.apache.org/.

  6. https://code.google.com/p/ml-hadoop/.

  7. https://hive.apache.org/.

  8. http://pig.apache.org/.

  9. http://storm.apache.org/.

  10. https://spark.apache.org/.

  11. http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/mllib-guide.html.

  12. http://sqoop.apache.org/.

  13. http://flume.apache.org/.

  14. http://zookeeper.apache.org/.

  15. https://github.com/twitter/elephant-bird/.

  16. https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery.

  17. http://polymaps.org/.

  18. http://www.nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx.

  19. http://moebio.com/.

  20. http://moebio.com/newk/twitter/.

  21. https://networkx.github.io/.

  22. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.pdf.

  23. http://openrefine.org/.

  24. http://vis.stanford.edu/wrangler/.

  25. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/plyr/index.html.

  26. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/.

  27. http://datacleaner.org/.

  28. http://www.paxata.com/.

  29. https://www.xplenty.com/.

  30. http://docs.oasis-open.org/xri/2.0/specs/xri-resolution-V2.0.html.

  31. https://hadoop.apache.org/.

  32. https://hbase.apache.org/.

  33. http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/.

  34. http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011.

  35. http://creativecommons.org/.

  36. http://www.europeana.eu/.

  37. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html.

  38. http://publicspending.net/.

  39. http://www.personalgenomes.org/.

  40. http://www.ands.org.au/guides/ethics-working-level.html.

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Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to Emna Mezghani for her contributions to this work. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Thessaly, Nea Ionia, Greece

    I. Anagnostopoulos

  2. University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA

    S. Zeadally

  3. University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

    E. Exposito

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  1. I. Anagnostopoulos
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  2. S. Zeadally
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  3. E. Exposito
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Correspondence to S. Zeadally.

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Anagnostopoulos, I., Zeadally, S. & Exposito, E. Handling big data: research challenges and future directions. J Supercomput 72, 1494–1516 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1677-z

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