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NASA GES DISC support of CO2 Data from OCO-2, ACOS, and AIRS

NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Centers (GES DISC) is the data center assigned to archive and distribute current AIRS, ACOS data and data from the upcoming OCO-2 mission. The GES DISC archives and supports data containing information on CO2 as well as other atmospheric composition, atmospheric dynamics, modeling and precipitation. Along with the data stewardship, an important mission of GES DISC is to facilitate access to and enhance the usability of data as well as to broaden the user base. GES DISC strives to promote the awareness of science content and novelty of the data by working with Science Team members and releasing news articles as appropriate. Analysis of events that are of interest to the general public, and that help in understanding the goals of NASA Earth Observing missions, have been among most popular practices.Users have unrestricted access to a user-friendly search interface, Mirador, that allows temporal, spatial, keyword and event searches, as well as an ontology-driven drill down. Variable subsetting, format conversion, quality screening, and quick browse, are among the services available in Mirador. The majority of the GES DISC data are also accessible through OPeNDAP (Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol) and WMS (Web Map Service). These services add more options for specialized subsetting, format conversion, image viewing and contributing to data interoperability.

Wei, Jennifer C↗

Data Presentation and Visualization (DPV) Interface Control Document

Data Presentation and Visualization (DPV) is a subset of the modeling and simulation (M&S) capabilities at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) that endeavors to address the challenges of how to present and share simulation output for analysts, stakeholders, decision makers, and other interested parties. DPV activities focus on the development and provision of visualization tools to meet the objectives identified above, as well as providing supporting tools and capabilities required to make its visualization products available and accessible across NASA.

Ontology↗

Social Semantics for an Effective Enterprise

An evolution of the Semantic Web, the Social Semantic Web (s2w), facilitates knowledge sharing with "useful information based on human contributions, which gets better as more people participate." The s2w reaches beyond the search box to move us from a collection of hyperlinked facts, to meaningful, real time context. When focused through the lens of Enterprise Search, the Social Semantic Web facilitates the fluid transition of meaningful business information from the source to the user. It is the confluence of human thought and computer processing structured with the iterative application of taxonomies, folksonomies, ontologies, and metadata schemas. The importance and nuances of human interaction are often deemphasized when focusing on automatic generation of semantic markup, which results in dissatisfied users and unrealized return on investment. Users consistently qualify the value of information sets through the act of selection, making them the de facto stakeholders of the Social Semantic Web. Employers are the ultimate beneficiaries of s2w utilization with a better informed, more decisive workforce; one not achieved with an IT miracle technology, but by improved human-computer interactions. Johnson Space Center Taxonomist Sarah Berndt and Mike Doane, principal owner of Term Management, LLC discuss the planning, development, and maintenance stages for components of a semantic system while emphasizing the necessity of a Social Semantic Web for the Enterprise. Identification of risks and variables associated with layering the successful implementation of a semantic system are also modeled.

Berndt, Sarah↗

A study of mapping exogenous knowledge representations into CONFIG

Qualitative reasoning is reasoning with a small set of qualitative values that is an abstraction of a larger and perhaps infinite set of quantitative values. The use of qualitative and quantitative reasoning together holds great promise for performance improvement in applications that suffer from large and/or imprecise knowledge domains. Included among these applications are the modeling, simulation, analysis, and fault diagnosis of physical systems. Several research groups continue to discover and experiment with new qualitative representations and reasoning techniques. However, due to the diversity of these techniques, it is difficult for the programs produced to exchange system models easily. The availability of mappings to transform knowledge from the form used by one of these programs to that used by another would open the doors for comparative analysis of these programs in areas such as completeness, correctness, and performance. A group at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) is working to develop CONFIG, a prototype qualitative modeling, simulation, and analysis tool for fault diagnosis applications in the U.S. space program. The availability of knowledge mappings from the programs produced by other research groups to CONFIG may provide savings in CONFIG's development costs and time, and may improve CONFIG's performance. The study of such mappings is the purpose of the research described in this paper. Two other research groups that have worked with the JSC group in the past are the Northwest University Group and the University of Texas at Austin Group. The former has produced a qualitative reasoning tool named SIMGEN, and the latter has produced one named QSIM. Another program produced by the Austin group is CC, a preprocessor that permits users to develop input for eventual use by QSIM, but in a more natural format. CONFIG and CC are both based on a component-connection ontology, so a mapping from CC's knowledge representation to CONFIG's knowledge representation was chosen as the focus of this study. A mapping from CC to CONFIG was developed. Due to differences between the two programs, however, the mapping transforms some of the CC knowledge to CONFIG as documentation rather than as knowledge in a form useful to computation. The study suggests that it may be worthwhile to pursue the mappings further. By implementing the mapping as a program, actual comparisons of computational efficiency and quality of results can be made between the QSIM and CONFIG programs. A secondary study may reveal that the results of the two programs augment one another, contradict one another, or differ only slightly. If the latter, the qualitative reasoning techniques may be compared in other areas, such as computational efficiency.

Mayfield, Blayne E.↗

Modeling Atmospheric Science Knowledge from Research Publications

NASA Earth Science Data Centers contain enormous amounts of remote sensing digital data. It is often a significant challenge for users to find data suitable for their research topic in these vast archives. One of the approaches is the usage-driven dataset discovery, where users seek publications on projects similar to their intended study. For this approach to be effective, users need a clear connection between the underlying data in the publications and the study objectives; this is not often apparent to non-expert users. Tools and methodologies that can help facilitate and organize these connections are therefore valuable for creating improved knowledge mappings, which can be further used by search engines to suggest data or publications best tailored to a user’s specific research goal. As an illustration of these challenges, in this work we focus on the atmospheric chemistry processes related to Earth environmental impacts such as ozone depletion, aerosols, smog formation, acid rain, and radiative forcing. We further limit our study to publications that use data from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) instrument flown on the Aura Earth Observing System. To create knowledge representations of science carried out in these publications, we use existing ontologies such as the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and Semantic Web for Earth and Environmental Terminology (SWEET). These ontologies together encompass term dictionaries that include measured variables, names of molecules or radicals, mission and instrument names, locations, action words, among many others. Based on these terms acknowledge graph database was populated with the terms retrieved from scientific publications that study atmospheric chemistry. These databases can be used to further enhance the automation of knowledge discovery and facilitate machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms or applications. These tools and methods can also be extended to apply to content from other related Earth science domains.

Irina Gerasimov↗

Transcriptomic Analysis of Irradiated Mouse Retina Following Readaptation

Rodent models are used as analogs for studying the effects of spaceflight. NASA GeneLab provides access to relevant omics datasets generated from spaceflight and ground-based experiments allowing for additional retrospective analysis. In this study, we used GeneLab’s GLDS-203, a dataset generated by researchers at Loma Linda University to study the impact of prolonged unloading and/or low-dose radiation on mouse retina. We analyzed transcriptomics data from retina of mice irradiated with gamma-rays for 21 days followed by 7 days, 1 month, or 4 months of readaptation. We obtained raw gene counts from GeneLab and performed differential gene expression analysis after data normalization. For each of the three timepoints, we performed differential expression analysis to compare transcriptional profiles for retina from irradiated vs. non-irradiated (controls) mice, all exposed to gravity. We observed the highest number of differentially expressed genes at 7 days, followed by 1 month and 4 months. Enrichment analysis showed top pathways (adjusted p-value < 0.05) were related to transport along microtubule and photoreceptor cell development in the 7-day readaptation group. Fewer significantly enriched pathways were observed for the 1-month group and included mRNA metabolic processes and neuron differentiation. No significantly enriched pathways were found in the 4-month group. The Gene Ontology biological processes common between the 7 days and 1-month groups include visual perception, synapse organization, and perception of light stimulus. This analysis is part of a larger effort to characterize the molecular mechanisms involved in retinal readaptation following radiation exposure. Future analyses will include other related retina datasets in GeneLab repository to assess whether gene expression patterns are consistent across different study cohorts.

Prachi Kothiyal↗

Enhancing NASA Earth Science Data Discovery from Scientific Publications

Earth observations from space borne instruments have evolved explosively in the past decades. Following closely are reanalysis systems assimilating model and observational data, yielding even longer records and larger number of variables. Thanks to advances in internet technology, it is now easier than ever to visualize and analyze these data using web interfaces. On the other hand, it also becomes an increasingly daunting task to build upon the existing knowledge published in various peer reviewed sources, and navigate toward the most relevant data, analysis, and visualization. We present an analysis of a subset of publications that utilized a popular visualization web interface at the NASA Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center. Known as "Giovanni", it allows researchers from wide backgrounds to work with hundreds of variables from space observations and assimilation systems. Since coming online more than a decade ago, Giovanni has been credited in more than 100 papers per year, and the total count now is estimated to be nearly 1,500. Many of these papers contain valuable information about when, where and how Giovanni has been used, and hence forge an opportunity to learn and share the knowledge of which variables were used for what research projects. The purpose of our work is to retrieve the information from the papers and organize it as a knowledge repository which links together datasets, variables, places, dates and phenomena all of which reflect the essence of the published research. Since the publications are unstructured texts, we use natural language processing along with machine learning methods in the retrieval process. One of the challenges is deciphering the dataset names, because in many cases researchers refer to variables, rather than the datasets containing them. To constrain the number of terms, we deploy Earth Science ontologies as dictionaries for the term extraction. We demonstrate that storing these terms and underlying ontologies, along with datasets, variables and papers in the knowledge graph database, enables various linkages between all these entities facilitating the data discovery. Thus, we are setting a qualitatively new stage in improvements of web data interfaces, where machine learning techniques are used to establish and optimize usage-based discovery of data.

Irina V Gerasimov↗

Intelligent Integrated Health Management for a System of Systems

An intelligent integrated health management system (IIHMS) incorporates major improvements over prior such systems. The particular IIHMS is implemented for any system defined as a hierarchical distributed network of intelligent elements (HDNIE), comprising primarily: (1) an architecture (Figure 1), (2) intelligent elements, (3) a conceptual framework and taxonomy (Figure 2), and (4) and ontology that defines standards and protocols. Some definitions of terms are prerequisite to a further brief description of this innovation: A system-of-systems (SoS) is an engineering system that comprises multiple subsystems (e.g., a system of multiple possibly interacting flow subsystems that include pumps, valves, tanks, ducts, sensors, and the like); 'Intelligent' is used here in the sense of artificial intelligence. An intelligent element may be physical or virtual, it is network enabled, and it is able to manage data, information, and knowledge (DIaK) focused on determining its condition in the context of the entire SoS; As used here, 'health' signifies the functionality and/or structural integrity of an engineering system, subsystem, or process (leading to determination of the health of components); 'Process' can signify either a physical process in the usual sense of the word or an element into which functionally related sensors are grouped; 'Element' can signify a component (e.g., an actuator, a valve), a process, a controller, an actuator, a subsystem, or a system; The term Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) is used to describe a capability that focuses on determining the condition (health) of every element in a complex system (detect anomalies, diagnose causes, prognosis of future anomalies), and provide data, information, and knowledge (DIaK) not just data to control systems for safe and effective operation. A major novel aspect of the present development is the concept of intelligent integration. The purpose of intelligent integration, as defined and implemented in the present IIHMS, is to enable automated analysis of physical phenomena in imitation of human reasoning, including the use of qualitative methods. Intelligent integration is said to occur in a system in which all elements are intelligent and can acquire, maintain, and share knowledge and information. In the HDNIE of the present IIHMS, an SoS is represented as being operationally organized in a hierarchical-distributed format. The elements of the SoS are considered to be intelligent in that they determine their own conditions within an integrated scheme that involves consideration of data, information, knowledge bases, and methods that reside in all elements of the system. The conceptual framework of the HDNIE and the methodologies of implementing it enable the flow of information and knowledge among the elements so as to make possible the determination of the condition of each element. The necessary information and knowledge is made available to each affected element at the desired time, satisfying a need to prevent information overload while providing context-sensitive information at the proper level of detail. Provision of high-quality data is a central goal in designing this or any IIHMS. In pursuit of this goal, functionally related sensors are logically assigned to groups denoted processes. An aggregate of processes is considered to form a system. Alternatively or in addition to what has been said thus far, the HDNIE of this IIHMS can be regarded as consisting of a framework containing object models that encapsulate all elements of the system, their individual and relational knowledge bases, generic methods and procedures based on models of the applicable physics, and communication processes (Figure 2). The framework enables implementation of a paradigm inspired by how expert operators monitor the health of systems with the help of (1) DIaK from various sources, (2) software tools that assist in rapid visualization of the condition of the system, (3) analical software tools that assist in reasoning about the condition, (4) sharing of information via network communication hardware and software, and (5) software tools that aid in making decisions to remedy unacceptable conditions or improve performance.

Smith, Harvey↗