Design of a Platform for Collecting and Analyzing Agricultural Big Data

Abstract

Big data have been presenting us with exciting opportunities and challenges in economic development. For instance, in the agriculture sector, mixing up of various agricultural data (e.g., weather data, soil data, etc.), and subsequently analyzing these data deliver valuable and helpful information to farmers and agribusinesses. However, massive data in agriculture are generated in every minute through multiple kinds of devices and services such as sensors and agricultural web markets. It leads to the challenges of big data problem including data collection, data storage, and data analysis. Although some systems have been proposed to address this problem, they are still restricted either in the type of data, the type of storage, or the size of data they can handle. In this paper, we propose a novel design of a platform for collecting and analyzing agricultural big data. The proposed platform supports (1) multiple methods of collecting data from various data sources using Flume and MapReduce; (2) multiple choices of data storage including HDFS, HBase, and Hive; and (3) big data analysis modules with Spark and Hadoop.