Ontology-drive data access at the NASA earth exchange

Abstract

The Ontology-driven Interactive Search Environment for Earth Science (ODISEES) and the Ontology-based Meta-data Portal for Unified Semantics (OlyMPUS), currently being developed under a ROSES AIST award, offer long-term solutions that will allow enhanced discovery and delivery of Earth Science data in the exascale-computing era. The ODISEES and OlyMPUS systems rely on an Earth science ontology and metadata repository that provide an ontological framework for describing NASA data holdings with enough detail and fidelity to enable researchers to quickly find and evaluate individual data variables. The Earth Science ontology is a highly precise and robust model of the Earth Science domain, expressed in a formal, logic-based language, that provides a conceptual framework for describing in detail the phenomena (i.e., radiation, aerosols, hydrology, carbon cycles, temperature, cloud properties, etc.) that are the subject of satellite observations and climate modeling, and the measurements of these phenomena that are the subject of NASA data products. To meet the challenges of using NASA big data to address global environmental issues, the Earth science research community needs a rich collaborative environment bringing together data access, computing capability and collaboration tools. The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) project provides this environment. The NEX is a collaborative platform to increase the capability of researchers to analyze large datasets by staging TB to PB-scale datasets and providing analysis tools to operate on those data, saving time and costs of data transfer. The NEX roadmap calls for incorporating enhanced search capability into NEX to assist scientists in identifying applicable datasets. The ODISEES system is being integrated into the NEX to provide this capability and the ODISEES ontology will be extended to include key NEX datasets such as Landsat.