The Information Inference Framework presented in this paper provides a general-purpose suite of tools enabling the definition and execution of flexible and reliable data processing workflows whose nodes offer application-specific processing capabilities. The IIF is designed for the purpose of processing big data, and it is implemented on top of Apache Hadoop-related technologies to cope with scalability and high-performance execution requirements. As a proof of concept we will describe how the framework is used to support linking and contextualization services in the context of the OpenAIRE infrastructure for scholarly communication.