Principal Investigator (PI): Sara Graves, The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)

NASA's strategic objectives state the need to improve the scientific and technological capabilities of the nation. Today's researchers and students have a difficult time fully exploiting the large volumes of NASA satellite imagery data, in part due to lack of tools that can provide the full spectrum of visually browsing remote data, analyzing a part or all of the imagery and extracting thematic information using advanced mining capabilities.

To address this problem, we propose to integrate NASA WorldWind, Interactive Visualizer and the Image Classifier for Satellites (IVICS) and the Algorithm Development and Mining (ADaM) toolkit using service mash-ups.

By leveraging existing mining and image processing services, the proposed integration will be both effective and efficient. The goal of this proposal is to integrate World Wind, IVICS and ADaM into a single seamless end user application, modifying the existing components as needed and integrating them via service mash-ups.

The tool will be evaluated in research and academic settings using specific science case studies and student projects, focusing on improved visualization and classification of aerosols in combined Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)/Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) data. The team will refine and customize the tool based on feedback, and make it widely available for diverse applications with a wide variety of NASA imagery.

World Wind, IVICS and ADaM are well established, mature tools with distinct, complementary capabilities. Synergistically integrating these individual tools will result in a complete, comprehensive, easy-to-use end user application for visualization, analysis and thematic information extraction from NASA imagery.

Deployed at UAH Information Technology and Systems Center.