Enhancing Access to NASA Data via Seamless Integration Into Decision Support Systems: two Examples

The amount and variety of information that can be extracted from NASA satellite data form a rich resource that is largely untapped by the applications user community. In part, this is because of the complexity and cost of using such data. Many approaches, such as subsetting, have been taken to ameliorate this situation. Mostly, however, they have not sufficiently addressed the core needs of the applications community. The latter is generally not interested in the data per se (e.g., how they are processed), but rather in the specific measurements (e.g., surface rain) from the data, which can be infused in some decision support system. These measurements should ideally be seamlessly accessible. To rapidly bridge the gap between NASA information systems and services and the practical needs of the applications (and research) community, the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) has collaborated with the Florida International University High Performance Database Research Center (FIU HPDRC) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA FAS) to demonstrate the feasibility of making NASA data more easily and seamlessly accessible via the Web, from within the FIU's TerraFly and the FAS' Crop Explorer environments, respectively. TerraFly currently serves a broad segment of the research and applications community (some 10,000 unique users per day), by facilitating the access to various textual, remotely sensed, and vector data. Crop Explorer is the primary decision support tool used by the FAS analysts to monitor the production, supply, and demand of agricultural commodities worldwide. The key NASA information system providing the data integrated into TerraFly and Crop Explorer is the GES DISC Interactive Online Visualization and Analysis Infrastructure (Giovanni), which enables users to easily and quickly obtain science information from the data, without having to download and handle large amounts of data. The seamless integration was effected by deep linking both TerraFly and Crop Explorer with Giovanni, to provide a dynamic, context-sensitive Web service for rainfall data. Planned work includes adding other measurements (e.g., aerosol, ozone, ocean color, sea surface temperature) and converting both deep linked systems to be compatible with OGC and OPeNDAP data interoperability standards. The integrated systems should notably contribute towards progress along several NASA Applications of National Priority, such as Agricultural Efficiency, Disaster Management, Ecological Forecasting, Homeland Security, and Public Health.