Leverages NASA investment in Visual System for Browsing, Analysis, and Retrieval of Data (ViSBARD)
Supports the Space Physics Archive Search and Exchange (SPASE) Consortium meta data model
Developed with open technologies including SOAP, XSTL, and XML
To provide NASA and the science community with direct access to space physics resources and data from all missions relevant to the global problem of the effects of solar particles and fields on the Earth. To achieve this objective, the NASA / Aquilent team set out to:
- Design and develop a system that provides a single access point to space physics data from disparate repositories
- Enable metadata searches with special requirements (e.g., limit to a certain temporal event) and/or restrictions
- Extend search functionality beyond simple metadata searches to include actual data searches
A virtual observatory is a suite of software applications that allows users to find, access, and use resources from a collection of product repositories and service providers. The virtual observatory answers queries by searching both the metadata and data itself.
Aquilent is working with an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics to support space and solar physics virtual observatories by developing:
- A Higher Order Query Service (HOQS) framework designed to perform mathematical analysis and correlations on data
- A toolkit for integrating existing standalone visualization applications into the virtual observatories environment
- Metadata Management Tools to facilitate metadata conversion and input
The HOQS will be used for searching and displaying virtual observatoy data based on parameters and equations. The framework architecture will be designed so that it can be adapted and extended for application to other virtual observatories. The HOQS will provide a data mart framework to support fast response time for content-based queries.
Metadata Management Tools provide an end-to-end system for metadata management. Aquilent provides technical expertise to a committee of scientists defining the schema, and we are building software for the editing, storage and distribution of the metadata.Aquilent's work with NASA will provide a powerful system to store, index, and analyze data. Scientists will be able to:
- Execute advanced search queries based on data content, as well as product description metadata
- Conduct ad-hoc, content-based query and data retrieval from virtual observatories
- Generate derived quantities and event-lists interactively using existing data and event lists, as well as perform discontinuity and correlation analyses
- Simplify metadata entry and mapping
In addition, the system's framework architecture can be adapted and extended for application with other virtual observatories.
