ODIN: A dataspace management system

ODIN is a system that supports the incremental pay-as-you-go integration of data sources into dataspaces and provides user-friendly querying mechanisms on top of them. We describe its main characteristics and underlying assumptions, including the user interactions required. Odin’s novelty lies in a largely automated bottom-up approach (i.e., driven by the sources at hand) that includes the user in the loop for disambiguation purposes. The on-site demonstration will feature an ongoing project with the World Health Organization (WHO). Online demo and videos: www.essi.upc.edu/dtim/odin/Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Building a scientific workflow framework to enable real‐time machine learning and visualization

Nowadays, we have entered the era of big data. In the area of high performance computing, large‐scale simulations can generate huge amounts of data with potentially critical information. However, these data are usually saved in intermediate files and are not instantly visible until advanced data analytics techniques are applied after reading all simulation data from persistent storages (eg, local disks or a parallel file system). This approach puts users in a situation where they spend long time on waiting for running simulations while not knowing the status of the running job. In this paper, we build a new computational framework to couple scientific simulations with multi‐step machine learning processes and in‐situ data visualizations. We also design a new scalable simulation‐time clustering algorithm to automatically detect fluid flow anomalies. This computational framework is built upon different software components and provides plug‐in data analysis and visualization functions over complex scientific workflows. With this advanced framework, users can monitor and get real‐time notifications of special patterns or anomalies from ongoing extreme‐scale turbulent flow simulations

The adoption of data spaces: Drivers toward federated data sharing

Data spaces have gained increasing attention, as they allow federated data sharing among and within participants of interoperable data spaces, for the benefit of all. However, data space initiatives are few in number; moreover, data space adoption among organizations is low. Research thus far has mainly focused on technical factors but lacks a more holistic approach that clarifies what drives data space adoption and federated data sharing as main functions. This exploratory study aims to fill this research gap; it identifies 12 drivers developed by 28 interviewed experts, discussing the coding techniques that are most frequently used in grounded theory. The identified drivers contribute to the current knowledge, while also potentially informing data space projects and organizations’ decisions regarding data space adoption

Assessing similarity of feature selection techniques in high-dimensional domains

Recent research efforts attempt to combine multiple feature selection techniques instead of using a single one. However, this combination is often made on an “ad hoc” basis, depending on the specific problem at hand, without considering the degree of diversity/similarity of the involved methods. Moreover, though it is recognized that different techniques may return quite dissimilar outputs, especially in high dimensional/small sample size domains, few direct comparisons exist that quantify these differences and their implications on classification performance. This paper aims to provide a contribution in this direction by proposing a general methodology for assessing the similarity between the outputs of different feature selection methods in high dimensional classification problems. Using as benchmark the genomics domain, an empirical study has been conducted to compare some of the most popular feature selection methods, and useful insight has been obtained about their pattern of agreement

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 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).This work is partially supported by GENESIS project, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades under project TIN2016-79269-R.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft