Beast: Scalable Exploratory Analytics on Spatiooral Data

Abstract

This paper introduces the open-source Beast system for scalable exploratory data science on big spatiooral data. Beast is based on well-established research and has been released to assist the research community with analyzing big spatiooral data. Beast provides a set of extensible components that naturally integrate with Spark to build exploratory data science pipelines. Beast can install in less than a minute on an existing Spark cluster and provides a wide array of features including loading vector and raster data represented in standard file formats, synthetic data generation for benchmarking, load-balanced spatial partitioning, data summarization, interactive visualization, and more. Beast builds on several research projects; its goal is to make all this research widely available to researchers in one integrative and coherent system.