First BDE-Health Webinar writeup

[crossposted at big-data-europe.com]

The first BDE Webinar for Societal Challenge 1: Health was held on the 25th of November. The goal of this virtual meetup was to present the current state of affairs to SC1’s stakeholders and to discuss the proposed pilot in this challenge. In total, 9 people attended the webinar, four of which were BDE presenters.

To start of the webinar, Victor de Boer from VU University Amsterdam who filled in for Bryn Williams-Jones presented the overall setup of the BDE project and the pilots in particular. He discussed the background of the Health pilot by recapping the main objectives of the OpenPHACTS project. View the slides here.

Aad Versteden and Erika Pauwels from BDE-partner TenForce then presented the current state and setup of the BDE Big Data platform. They discussed background issues around ‘big data’, presented the overall architecture and what the different components will look like. View their slides here.

Ronald Siebes from VUA then continued by detailing the SC1 pilot. For the first Health pilot, we will replicate part of the OpenPHACTS functionality, to ensure that the BDE infrastructure is able to deal with the issues surrounding the Variety of data. In subsequent phases, the pilot will be extended with more functionality, targeting other “V’s” of Big Data such as Velocity or Volume. Ronald’s slides can be found here

Finally, the floor was opened for a short but interesting discussion. From the discussion, we take that it will remain a challenge for BDE to make sure that the generic architecture of the platform is able to deal with the wildly varying demands of domain experts in the SC domains. Also, we were reminded that the piloting and evaluation methodology of OpenPHACTS was one of its success factors. This is something that we will indeed be taking into account in the BDE piloting and evaluation plan, the first version of which will be delivered at the end of this year.