T-Rex: The NASA Technology Taxonomy Recommender System

Abstract

NASA tracks over 16,000 technology projects across the Agency, from propulsion systems to software. These projects are classified according to NASA’s Technology Taxonomy to facilitate data search, extraction, and application. In 2020, the Taxonomy was revised to better align strategic goals with project technical disciplines. Manual re-classification of cur-rent and historical projects was estimated to take thousands of technologist labor hours. Instead of manual classification, our team developed T-Rex, a recommender engine, trained on just a small set of manually classified projects. T-Rex was used to classify the projects and then integrate the data into TechPort to recommend classes to users when updating projects. The system and methodology are used in other NASA projects, and T-Rex has achieved 95% accepted accuracy overall.