The BigDataEurope platform - supporting the variety dimension of big data

The management and analysis of large-scale datasets - described with the term Big Data - involves the three classic dimensions volume, velocity and variety. While the former two are well supported by a plethora of software components, the variety dimension is still rather neglected. We present the BDE platform - an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use and adaptable (cluster-based and standalone) platform for the execution of big data components and tools like Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Flume and Cassandra. The BDE platform was designed based upon the requirements gathered from seven of the societal challenges put forward by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 programme and targeted by the BigDataEurope pilots. As a result, the BDE platform allows to perform a variety of Big Data flow tasks like message passing, storage, analysis or publishing. To facilitate the processing of heterogeneous data, a particular innovation of the platform is the Semantic Layer, which allows to directly process RDF data and to map and transform arbitrary data into RDF. The advantages of the BDE platform are demonstrated through seven pilots, each focusing on a major societal challenge