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Synopsis

Texera is a system to support big data analytics as a Web-based service by using declarative GUI-based interactive workflows.

Motivation

Many data analysts need to spend a significant amount of effort on low-level computation to do data manipulation and preparation. There are new machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and packages available. These tasks are especially tough for non-IT community due to their lack of IT background, limited programming skills, and no knowledge to set up and maintain a computing infrastructure for large-scale data analytics.
The available workflow based analysis systems are not scalable. They are mostly software systems that run on a single machine and their architecture doesn't support huge amounts of data. Also, the existing systems support little or no interaction during the execution of the workflow. They face the long running time and lack of debugging tools, and need to re-run the program after making just some minor changes.
Cloud-based services and technologies have emerged and advanced significantly in the past decade. Emerging browser-based techniques make it possible to develop powerful browser-based interfaces, which also benefit from high-speed networks.

Goals

Provide data analytics as cloud services so users do not need to download software and do periodic updates and patches. Plus sharing becomes much easier;
Provide a browser-based GUI for developers to form a workflow plan declaratively without writing code;
Allow non-IT people to do data analytics.
Increase productivity of data analytics.
Support huge volumes of data efficiently.
Allow users to interact with the workflow, pause/resume and debug it during the execution.

Sample Workflow Plan

The following is a workflow formulated using the Texera GUI in a Web browser. It consists of a workflow of basic operators, such as keyword search, sentiment analysis, and NLP.

Texera GUI Query Plan