The TOREADOR project (H2020-ICT-2015, Grant 688797) is aimed at overcoming some major hurdles that until now have prevented many European companies from reaping the full benefits of Big Data analytics (BDA). Companies and organisations in Europe have become aware of the potential competitive advantage they could get by timely and accurate Big Data analytics, but lack the IT expertise and budget to fully exploit BDA. To overcome this hurdle, TOREADOR takes a model-based BDA-as-a-service (MBDAaaS) approach, providing models of the entire Big Data analysis process and of its artefacts. TOREADOR open, suitable-for-standardisation models will support substantial automation and commoditisation of Big Data analytics, while enabling it to be easily tailored to domain-specific customer requirements.