Managing NASA’s Data
by Kendall Clark
NASA has an inconceivably annoying amount and diversity of data (these are good problems to have; but, damn, they’re hard); and the Agency is likely to have more management obligations that it has to satisfy with less budget. But at least it’s only nearly everyone in the world who’s interested in NASA’s core data!
Ouch. Ouch!
This week I’m spending most of my time at a NASA Enterprise Architecture meeting out at UMD; imagine: lots of smart people in a room trying to figure out how to do more—in some cases, a lot more—with less, sometimes a lot less. That sucks in the small, but it’s exciting in the large.
SemWeb mavens will be happy to know that ontologies are playing a growing role in efforts to manage NASA’s information, particularly around the Data Reference Model part of the Federal Enterprise Architecture. That’s a lot of syllables that come down to how the Agency manages its data across its core lines of business. C&P cares about all of this; but especially the integration and policy management pieces.
There are other technologies in use, of course, it’s not an OWL clean sweep; but it should be happy making to see OWL being used for real problems in the federal space that have everything to do with cool stuff like science (aeronautics, cosmology, physics).
