SCALABLE SYSTEMS FOR DATA ANALYTICS AND INTEGRATION

ii The Internet allows people and businesses to communicate and collaborate at an unprecedented scale. As a result, several new trends are emerging in the world of information. Two of these are: (1) more and more information is shared in real time, such as text messages and pictures in social networks like Twitter and Facebook; and (2) interchanged information has increasingly different formats, or schemas. For example, medical data is interchanged in different schemas depending on the hospital or insurance company. Information systems that support these trends must, therefore, process and analyze data in real time and integrate data in many different schemas. Since both trends are ongoing, there is a need for systems that scale in these dimensions. Today’s information systems, however, scale insufficiently. As we will show, current systems for real-time analytics sacrifice important factors such as data consistency; current approaches to data integration do not scale with the number of schema