Principal Investigator (PI): Rahul Ramachandran, The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)

Scientific data mining is a very powerful means for automated knowledge extraction from the ever-increasing volumes of science observations and model output data available. NASA's Second Data Mining Workshop found that maturing data mining techniques show "potential for significantly expanding the scientific understanding of NASA's Earth science data." However, this type of tool has generally been difficult for domain scientists and students to fully exploit without extended learning curves. And even data mining specialists may not be familiar with the full range of components in a mining toolkit, so potentially useful mining strategies may be ignored.

To facilitate exploitation of these promising techniques by the increasingly IT-sophisticated NASA Earth science community, UAH leads a collaborative team in proposing to leverage Semantic Web technologies to build a Smart Assistant for Mining (SAM) and to deploy it for use at two data centers. This project will reuse an existing toolkit of data mining web services designed specifically for the analysis of NASA data in a web-based, service-oriented architecture. It will also leverage and extend an initial ontology describing data mining services, with links to other ontologies describing the Earth science problem domain and relevant data sets. The new SAM user interface tool, which integrates semantic reasoning into a traditional workflow composer, will allow users to discover available data and services, assist users in composing mining workflows, and invoke them to perform the desired analysis.

SAM will provide a useful tool to assist researchers in creating data analysis and mining workflows for targeted Earth science problems in the Climate Variability and Change Science Focus Area. It will also position these services for integration with many other science data services in the Semantic Web Services context, pointing the way toward increased science return from NASA data.

Deployed at UAH Information Technology and Systems Center (ITSC).