Information Technology Infrastructure for the NASA Earth Science Enterprise Solutions Network

Aanstoos, J.V., Shaw, D. R., O'Hara C., & Frisbie, T. (2006). Information Technology Infrastructure for the NASA Earth Science Enterprise Solutions Network. 2006 Fall Meeting. San Francisco, USA: American Geophysical Union.

The NASA Applied Sciences Program uses the term Solutions Network in the context of its Enterprise Architecture to describe the ability of different components of the enterprise to generate ideas for new ways to use NASA missions, research, and/or models in conjunction with operational decision-making processes (or decision support systems) to achieve a particular benefit to society. In this paper, we describe the development of an information technology infrastructure that will facilitate that ability. The two main components of this infrastructure are: the Research Projects Knowledge Base (RPKB); and the Partner Network Knowledge Base (PNKB). The RPKB aims to index all relevant NASA research result publications in a database that will be interoperable with the evolving NASA enterprise architecture system and will share relevant table space with it. In particular, fields from this system identifying relevant NASA missions, models, and data products will be used to cross-index the data collected on published results of research projects. Fields characterizing the research results based on the seven Earth-Sun system science focus areas and the twelve applications of national priority are included. In the course of developing the RPKB, novel uses of existing online databases and search tools have been developed. In addition, data mining tools are being developed for facilitating the location of candidate results and the indexing of relevant matches. The PNKB database will characterize the current network of NASA Earth-Sun system partners. This includes information on organizations and agencies funded by or partnered with NASA to conduct Earth-Sun system scientific research, technology, and applications projects. The relationships between NASA programs and project sponsors are also captured in this database. Both the PNKB and the RPKB will be integrated with an existing, evolving model of the NASA Earth Science Enterprise using an enterprise architecture modeling and viewing tool. This will enable users of the tool to view the network in a manner that will enable the identification of potential solutions which bring benefits to society though the use of NASA missions, data, models, and research results.