Thematic Observation Search, Segmentation, Collation and Analysis system (TOS2CA)

Over the years, AIST has supported the development of a large and diverse set of science software resources – technical algorithms, data ingestion and processing modules, visualization capabilities, cloud computing, immersive environments – for the analysis and representation of science data and scientific results for different instruments, missions and applications. These capabilities were mostly tailored for a particular mission or even a particular set of users such as mission personnel, science teams or singular researchers. This proposal is to remedy the fact that we still do not have a practical framework for inter- nor intra- coordination and collaboration to promote and reuse these developed and refined resources, particularly to search for, collate, analyze and visualize data relevant to the Earth System Observatory (EOS) investigations. The best analyses of a phenomenon typically require identifying scenarios of specific interest in the observations, often in nearly-coincident nearly-simultaneous data from different observing systems. For NASA's current Program of Record (PoR) and incipient EOS, the need for this ability to identify, collate and analyze data from different sources – including different missions – that are relevant to a single user-specified scientific process or phenomenon is all the more pressing. TOS2CA is a user-driven, data-centric system that can identify, collate, statistically characterize and serve Earth system data relevant to a given phenomenon relevant to EOS. Designed as a multi-discipline analytic collaborative framework (ACF), TOS2CA will not only facilitate the collation and analysis of data from disparate sources, it will also make it possible for scientists to establish science-traceability requirements, quantify detection thresholds, define uncertainty requirements and establish data sufficiency to formulate truly innovative missions. To do this, TOS2CA will allow one to characterize the joint distribution of several variables, and quantify and visualize how well that joint distribution would be sampled from different orbits over different durations. As an ACF, the components of TOS2CA will include: 1) a user-driven thematic data collector; 2) a statistical analyzer; and 3) a user-friendly visualization and data exploration toolkit. One of the first objectives of TOS2CA is to develop a means for efficiently identifying, managing and utilizing relevant PoR datasets – typically massive, heterogenous and with varied access mechanisms – for analysis. TOS2CA will streamline and encapsulate the ingestion of these data in support of Earth System Observatory analyses, maintaining data fidelity, provenance and repeatability of the data collation, and providing a realistic quantitative evaluation of results.. The data collation will be developed by adapting software already developed for the joint NASA-ESA "Multi-mission Analysis Platform Project" collaboration for the eco-systems community. The first component of TOS2CA is a data curation service with an ontological approach to identify data relevant to a user-defined phenomenon, and an information extraction and collation module made very efficient by systematic use of metadata records stored in NASA's Common Metadata Repository (CMR). The efficiency of this data curation approach is driven by the definition of the specific Earth Science phenomenon. A vocabulary that will be defined by subject matter experts from GCMD keywords, will allow users to formulate a phenomenon so that it is mathematically supported on a bounded topological subset of space-time. The connected components of this subspace will then allow TOS2CA to break the curation service down chronologically, and thereby drastically reduce the number of potentially relevant data granules that need to be interrogated for each connected component.

Advance Earth system science knowledge through the Identification, develop, and demonstrate innovative information systems technologies

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