Scalable Similarity Search for Big Data - Challenges and Research Objectives.

Analysis of contemporary Big Data collections require an effective and efficient content-based access to data which is usually unstructured. This first implies a necessity to uncover descriptive knowledge of complex and heterogeneous objects to make them findable. Second, multimodal search structures are needed to efficiently execute complex similarity queries possibly in outsourced environments while preserving privacy. Four specific research objectives to tackle the challenges are outlined and discussed. It is believed that a relevant solution of these problems is necessary for a scalable similarity search operating on Big Data.