Batch to Real-Time: Incremental Data Collection & Analytics Platform

Real-time data collection and analytics is a desirable but challenging feature to provide in data-intensive software systems. To provide highly concurrent and efficient real-time analytics on streaming data at interactive speeds requires a well-designed software architecture that makes use of a carefully selected set of software frameworks. In this paper, we report on the design and implementation of the Incremental Data Collection & Analytics Platform (IDCAP). The IDCAP provides incremental data collection and indexing in real-time of social media data; support for real-time analytics at interactive speeds; highly concurrent batch data processing supported by a novel data model; and a front-end web client that allows an analyst to manage IDCAP resources, to monitor incoming data in real-time, and to provide an interface that allows incremental queries to be performed on top of large Twitter datasets.