Extending Apache Spark with a Mediation Layer

With the recent growth of data volumes in many disciplines of both industry and academia many new Big Data Management systems have emerged to provide scalable tools for efficient data storing, processing and analysis. However, most of these systems offer little support for efficiently integrating multiple external sources under a uniform schema and a single query access point, which greatly simplifies further analytics. In this work, we present Spark Mediator, a system that extends the logical data integration capabilities of Apache Spark. As a use case, we show the application of Spark Mediator to the integration of schizophrenia neuroimaging data and compare with previous data integration systems.