SBIR-STTR Award

Aquilent, Inc. proposes to support the effort of Virtual Space Physics Observatory (VSPO) by developing services to expand the VSPO search capabilities, developing tools that facilitate metadata conversion and input, and integrating existing standalone visualization applications to operate in the VSPO environment. This proposal seeks to: ?Enable scientists to execute advanced search queries. (Queries which rely on more then product description metadata) ?Enable scientists to utilize VSPO middleware capabilities directly from visualization applications. ?Develop services that provide support for advanced search queries. Integrate these services into the VSPO architecture. ?Develop a metadata editor tool, designed to simplify metadata entry/mapping associated with describing data products. ?Integrate standalone visualization applications such as ViSBARD[1] to work seamlessly with VSPO middleware.

Potential NASA Commercial Applications:
(LIMIT 150 WORDS) The visualization component of this proposal, the adaptation of ViSBARD, has potential NASA applications for scientists and researchers interested in the display and analysis of multiple disparate vector data sets. The data search and query component of this proposal has potential application inside NASA in the development of Virtual Observatories and in the Earth Sciences domain where metadata search and definition are required.

Potential NON-NASA Commercial Applications:
(LIMIT 150 WORDS) Possible commercial applications for the ViSBARD component of this proposal outside of NASA include the study of fluid or aerodynamics and vector quantities. The search components of this proposal have non-NASA applicability as well. They provide tools for strategy consulting to entities and companies in the areas of metadata definition and custom search tools.

Aquilent, Inc. proposes to support ad-hoc, content-based query and data retrieval from virtual observatories (VxO) by developing 1) Higher Order Query Services that will work together with the Virtual Space Physics Observatory (VSPO) effort. These services will enable scientists to generate derived quantities and event-lists interactively based on existing science data and existing temporal and phenomenal event lists, as well as perform discontinuity and correlation analysis of time series derived from local low/medium resolution datasets. The framework architecture will be designed so that it can be adapted and extended for application to other VxO's. 2) Develop a metadata/data access toolkit that enables visualization and data analysis clients to browse VxO resources directly and retrieve discovered data from the source (PI) archive and demonstrate the capability through extensions to the VSPO Gateway API using VisBARD. 3) Support the creation, validation, and maintenance of product description metadata for VxO's through simplified metadata management tools whose configuration is driven by the same XML Schema that defines the VxO's data model. The tools include a configurable metadata editor backed by a central repository and XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) utility scripts. The XSLT scripts enable generation of the tool configuration schema from a master XML Schema, output of product metadata that complies with the VxO data model, and partially automate the update process for product description metadata as the VxO and SPASE data models evolve.

Potential NASA Commercial Applications:
(LIMIT 100 WORDS) Possible commercial applications for the visualization component of this proposal outside of NASA include the study of fluid and plasma dynamics, aerodynamics, bioinformatics and other applications that analyze time series of scalar or vector quantities. The VSPO client access component has potential applications for users of RSI IDL, MATLAB, and other visualization and analysis packages that desire integrated data discovery and retrieval from distributed data archives. Specific applications in the bioinformatics domain are under investigation with the Communications Engineering Branch of the National Library of Medicine with respect to enhancing their Multimedia Database Tool, which provides web-based access to large medical image databases, to provide researchers with a seamless transition between browse/query access to reduced resolution images and detailed visualization and analytical access to selected full resolution images and their associated metadata.



Potential NON-NASA Commercial Applications:
:
(LIMIT 100 WORDS) Potential NASA applications of the visualization component of this proposal include research efforts that require the display and analysis of multiple disparate vector data sets, development of an advanced viewer for the Mission Independent Data Layer (MIDL) project being one possibility. Potential application of the search and metadata editor components include other VxO's and in the Earth Sciences domain where content-based query of massive data archives is required