BigExcel: A Web-Based Framework for Exploring Big Data in Social Sciences

TL;DR

BigExcel is a web-based framework designed to make big data analytics accessible, easy to explore, and quick to implement for social sciences researchers without extensive technical expertise.

Contribution

The paper introduces BigExcel, a novel three-tier web framework that simplifies big data exploration and analysis for non-computer scientists in social sciences.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated with Yahoo datasets

Facilitates ad hoc data exploration with minimal effort

Supports quick and easy analytics in social sciences

Abstract

This paper argues that there are three fundamental challenges that need to be overcome in order to foster the adoption of big data technologies in non-computer science related disciplines: addressing issues of accessibility of such technologies for non-computer scientists, supporting the ad hoc exploration of large data sets with minimal effort and the availability of lightweight web-based frameworks for quick and easy analytics. In this paper, we address the above three challenges through the development of 'BigExcel', a three tier web-based framework for exploring big data to facilitate the management of user interactions with large data sets, the construction of queries to explore the data set and the management of the infrastructure. The feasibility of BigExcel is demonstrated through two Yahoo Sandbox datasets. The first dataset is the Yahoo Buzz Score data set we use for quantitatively predicting trending technologies and the second is the Yahoo n-gram corpus we use for qualitatively inferring the coverage of important events. A demonstration of the BigExcel framework and source code is available at http://bigdata.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/projects/bigexcel-exploring-big-data-for-social-sciences/.