Simplifying NASA Earth science data and information access through natural language processing based data analysis and visualization

NASA Earth science data collected from satellites, model assimilation, airborne missions, and field campaigns are large, complex and evolving. Such characteristics pose great challenges for end users (e.g., Earth science and applied science users, students, citizen scientists) particularly for those who are unfamiliar with NASA's EOSDIS and thus unable to access and utilize datasets effectively. For example, a novice user may simply ask for what is the total rainfall for a flooding event in my county yesterday? For an experienced user (e.g., algorithm developer), a question can be, how did my rainfall product perform, compared to ground observations, during a flooding event? Nonetheless, with rapid information technology development such as natural language processing, it is possible to develop simplified Web interfaces and back-end processing components to handle such questions and deliver answers in terms of text, data or graphic results directly to users.

In this presentation, we describe the main challenges for end users with different levels of expertise in accessing and utilizing NASA Earth science data. Surveys reveal that most non-professional users normally do not want to download and handle raw data as well as conduct heavy-duty data processing tasks. Often they just want some simple graphics or data for various purposes. To them, simple and intuitive user interfaces are sufficient because complicated ones can be difficult and time consuming to learn. Professionals also want such interfaces to answer many questions from datasets. One solution is to develop a natural language based search box like Google and the search results can be text, data, graphics and more. Now the challenge is, with natural language processing, can we design a system to process a scientific question typed in by a user? In this presentation, we describe our plan for such prototype. The workflow is, 1) extract needed information (e.g., variables, spatial and temporal information, processing methods, etc.) from the input, 2) process the data in the backend, and 3) deliver the results (data or graphics) to the user.