'Big Data' platform TWIRL born in Ghent

Outerthought and Oxynade, two software companies from the Belgian Ghent area, are collaborating in the context of the TWIRL project, a European research project on open platforms able to process, mine, interlink and fuse data originating from real world applications and on-line data sources. The research groups IBBT/Ghent University (IBCN) and Sirris join their effort.

Lily

The research project sits at the root of new developments in Lily, the Big Data content repository from Outerthought, that will combine storage, indexing search with profile management, analytics and content recommendations in its next versions.

The Lily platform is based on Apache Hadoop and HBase. Hadoop and HBase are being used in large organizations such as TomTom, Netlog, Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo!, but the technology is still regarded as complex and finicky to use.

Lily makes this technology easy to adopt and use for every organization with large-scale data management needs.

"Research without field validation has no purpose", says Steven Noels, Outerthought CEO, "so we are very happy to be able to collaborate with Oxynade on the TWIRL project. They provide us with a lot of practical experience and knowledge about event recommendations, and they possess an immense set of practical trial data."

Outerthought and Oxynade receive a Flemish research grant for their collaboration to the amount of 550.000 EUR for a 100 manmonth project. The TWIRL project also got the EU ITEA label, which guarantees high-quality industry research.