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At least 505 records · Page 28

Interactive Web Application for Traffic Simulation Data Management and Visualization

As traffic simulation software becomes more effective for realistically simulating and analyzing traffic dynamics and vehicle interactions on the mesoscopic and microscopic level, the management, dissemination, and collaborative visualization of traffic simulation results produced by individual transportation planners presents a significant challenge. Existing online content management systems have a very limited capability in allowing users to query specific traffic simulation scenarios and geospatially visualize simulation results through shareable and interactive web interfaces. This paper presents a web-based application for promoting the archiving, sharing, and visualization of large-scale traffic simulation outputs. The application is developed to enhance cyber-physical controls, communications, and public education for collaborative transportation planning. Unique features of the web application include: (a) allowing users to upload their new traffic simulation scenarios (parameters and outputs), as well as search existing scenarios using easily accessible interfaces; (b) optimizing simulation output files with heterogeneous data formats and projected coordinate systems for web-based storage and management using a scalable and searchable data/metadata standard; (c) standardizing user-uploaded simulation outputs using web interfaces and data processing libraries with parallel computing capacity; and (d) providing shareable web visual interfaces for visualizing the traffic flow and signal information stored in simulation outputs (e.g., regional traffic patterns and individual vehicle interactions) and visually comparing multiple simulation outputs both spatially and temporally. Furthermore, the paper presents the conceptual design and implementation of this application, and demonstrates the application’s performance for sharing, comparing, and visualizing simulation outputs from VISSIM and SUMO, two commonly used traffic simulation software programs.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Management. A continuing bibliography with indexes

This bibliography cites 604 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in 1979 covering the management of research and development, contracts, production, logistics, personnel, safety, reliability and quality control. Program, project, and systems management; management policy, philosophy, tools, and techniques; decision making processes for managers; technology assessment; management of urban problems; and information for managers on Federal resources, expenditures, financing, and budgeting are also covered. Abstracts are provided as well as subject, personal author, and corporate source indexes.

Source record↗

Information Management Platform for Data Analytics and Aggregation (IMPALA) System Design Document

The System Design document tracks the design activities that are performed to guide the integration, installation, verification, and acceptance testing of the IMPALA Platform. The inputs to the design document are derived from the activities recorded in Tasks 1 through 6 of the Statement of Work (SOW), with the proposed technical solution being the completion of Phase 1-A. With the documentation of the architecture of the IMPALA Platform and the installation steps taken, the SDD will be a living document, capturing the details about capability enhancements and system improvements to the IMPALA Platform to provide users in development of accurate and precise analytical models. The IMPALA Platform infrastructure team, data architecture team, system integration team, security management team, project manager, NASA data scientists and users are the intended audience of this document. The IMPALA Platform is an assembly of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products installed on an Apache-Hadoop platform. User interface details for the COTS products will be sourced from the COTS tools vendor documentation. The SDD is a focused explanation of the inputs, design steps, and projected outcomes of every design activity for the IMPALA Platform through installation and validation.

Carnell, Andrew↗

The PDS4 Information Model Design Principles - How Well Did They Work?

The Planetary Data System (PDS) recently released Version 1.5 of the PDS4 Information Model, the primary component of the PDS4 Information Architecture. The Information Model is now stable and is in use by three active missions and several missions in various phases of development. The Information Model drives the PDS4 Information System using a multi-level governance structure that provides for common, discipline, and mission level management of the system’s information standards. For the development of the PDS4 Information Model several design principles were adopted. This paper will describe each design principle and then explain how well they worked, problems encountered during development and their solutions, and how well the results meet the requirements of the multi-discipline planetary science community.

Martin, Michael↗

New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T)

The New Observing Strategies (NOS) initiative within the NASA Earth Science Technology Office(ESTO)Advanced Information Systems Technology(AIST) program envisions future Earth science missions with distributed sensors(nodes) interconnected by a communications fabric that enables dynamic and intelligent operations [1].Some NOS concepts resemble systems-of-systems or collaborative systems where operational authority is distributed among multiple systems, necessitating new methods for systems engineering and design to cope with more decentralized control over constituent systems[2].The New Observing Strategies Testbed (NOS-T, verbalized as "enoh es tee") is a computational environment to develop, test, mature, and socialize new operating concepts and technology for NOS. NOS-T provides infrastructure to integrate and orchestrate user-contributed applications for system-of-systems test cases with true distributed control over constituent systems. The overall concept, illustrated in Figure 1, interconnects individual user applications and a NOS-T manager application via common information system infrastructure to coordinate the execution of virtual Earth science missions. NOS-T enables principal investigators to conduct test runs in the same environment, systematically changing variables to assess the overall efficacy of the proposed new observing strategies. Recorded data and outcomes provide evidence to advance technology readiness level and improve or innovate upon existing Earth science measurement techniques

Paul Grogan↗

Management control and status reports documentation standard and Data Item Descriptions (DID). Volume of the information system life-cycle and documentation standards, volume 5

This is the fifth of five volumes on Information System Life-Cycle and Documentation Standards. This volume provides a well organized, easily used standard for management control and status reports used in monitoring and controlling the management, development, and assurance of informations systems and software, hardware, and operational procedures components, and related processes.

Callender, E. David↗

Issues in Defining Software Architectures in a GIS Environment

The primary mission of the Pan-American Center for Earth and Environmental Studies (PACES) is to advance the research areas that are relevant to NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program. One of the activities at PACES is the establishment of a repository for geographical, geological and environmental information that covers various regions of Mexico and the southwest region of the U.S. and that is acquired from NASA and other sources through remote sensing, ground studies or paper-based maps. The center will be providing access of this information to other government entities in the U.S. and Mexico, and research groups from universities, national laboratories and industry. Geographical Information Systems(GIS) provide the means to manage, manipulate, analyze and display geographically referenced information that will be managed by PACES. Excellent off-the-shelf software exists for a complete GIS as well as software for storing and managing spatial databases, processing images, networking and viewing maps with layered information. This allows the user flexibility in combining systems to create a GIS or to mix these software packages with custom-built application programs. Software architectural languages provide the ability to specify the computational components and interactions among these components, an important topic in the domain of GIS because of the need to integrate numerous software packages. This paper discusses the characteristics that architectural languages address with respect to the issues relating to the data that must be communicated between software systems and components when systems interact. The paper presents a background on GIS in section 2. Section 3 gives an overview of software architecture and architectural languages. Section 4 suggests issues that may be of concern when defining the software architecture of a GIS. The last section discusses the future research effort and finishes with a summary.

Acosta, Jesus↗

Study of Tools for Command and Telemetry Dictionaries

The Command and Telemetry Dictionary is at the heart of space missions. The C&T Dictionary represents all of the information that is exchanged between the various systems both in space and on the ground. Large amounts of ever-changing information has to be disseminated to all for the various systems and sub-systems throughout all phases of the mission. The typical approach of having each sub-system manage it's own information flow, results in a patchwork of methods within a mission. This leads to significant duplication of effort and potential errors. More centralized methods have been developed to manage this data flow. This presentation will compare two tools that have been developed for this purpose, CCDD and SCIMI that were designed to work with the Core Flight System (cFS).

Command Telemetry Dictionary C&↗

AOIPS water resources data management system

The text and computer-generated displays used to demonstrate the AOIPS (Atmospheric and Oceanographic Information Processing System) water resources data management system are investigated. The system was developed to assist hydrologists in analyzing the physical processes occurring in watersheds. It was designed to alleviate some of the problems encountered while investigating the complex interrelationships of variables such as land-cover type, topography, precipitation, snow melt, surface runoff, evapotranspiration, and streamflow rates. The system has an interactive image processing capability and a color video display to display results as they are obtained.

Vanwie, P.↗

The Influence of Future Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4) on Doctrine and the Operational Commander's Decision-Making Process

Future C4 systems will alter the traditional balance between force and information, having a profound influence on doctrine and the operational commander's decision making process. The Joint Staff's future vision of C4 is conceptualized in 'C4I for the Warrior' which envisions a joint C4I architecture providing timely sensor to shoot information direct to the warfighter. C4 system must manage and filter an overwhelming amount of information; deal with interoperability issues; overcome technological limitations; meet emerging security requirements; and protect against 'Information Warfare.' Severe budget constraints necessitate unified control of C4 systems under singular leadership for the common good of all the services. In addition, acquisition policy and procedures must be revamped to allow new technologies to be fielded quickly; and the commercial marketplace will become the preferred starting point for modernization. Flatter command structures are recommended in this environment where information is available instantaneously. New responsibilities for decision making at lower levels are created. Commanders will have to strike a balance between exerting greater control and allowing subordinates enough flexibility to maintain initiative. Clearly, the commander's intent remains the most important tool in striking this balance.

Mayer, Michael G.↗

Pilot climate data system: A state-of-the-art capability in scientific data management

The Pilot Climate Data System (PCDS) was developed by the Information Management Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to manage a large collection of climate-related data of interest to the research community. The PCDS now provides uniform data catalogs, inventories, access methods, graphical displays and statistical calculations for selected NASA and non-NASA data sets. Data manipulation capabilities were developed to permit researchers to easily combine or compare data. The current capabilities of the PCDS include many tools for the statistical survey of climate data. A climate researcher can examine any data set of interest via flexible utilities to create a variety of two- and three-dimensional displays, including vector plots, scatter diagrams, histograms, contour plots, surface diagrams and pseudo-color images. The graphics and statistics subsystems employ an intermediate data storage format which is data-set independent. Outside of the graphics system there exist other utilities to select, filter, list, compress, and calculate time-averages and variances for any data of interest. The PCDS now fully supports approximately twenty different data sets and is being used on a trial basis by several different in-house research grounds.

Smith, P. H.↗

Syntactic and Semantic Validation without a Metadata Management System

The ability to maintain quality information is essential to securing the confidence in any system for which the information serves as a data source. NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), an online Earth science data locator, holds over 9000 data set descriptions and is in a constant state of flux as metadata are created and updated on a daily basis. In such a system, the importance of maintaining the consistency and integrity of these-metadata is crucial. The GCMD has developed a metadata management system utilizing XML, controlled vocabulary, and Java technologies to ensure the metadata not only adhere to valid syntax, but also exhibit proper semantics.

Pollack, Janine↗

Mass Storage Performance Information System

The purpose of this task is to develop a data warehouse to enable system administrators and their managers to gather information by querying the data logs of the MDSDS. Currently detailed logs capture the activity of the MDSDS internal to the different systems. The elements to be included in the data warehouse are requirements analysis, data cleansing, database design, database population, hardware/software acquisition, data transformation, query and report generation, and data mining.

Scheuermann, Peter↗

Science on the Space Station: The opportunity and the challenge - A NASA view

The Science and Applications Information System (SAIS) which will provide users with remote, interactive, and iterative access from their home locations to the many information system services is introduced. Such aspects as transaction management, standard format data units, and the use of intelligent data management systems are discussed. It is concluded that new and innovative approaches to information management must be developed so that the full potential of the Space Station can be realized with respect to the demands of the entire science community.

Devirian, Michael↗

Integrated Financial Management Program

Having worked in the Employees and Commercial Payments Branch of the Financial Management Division for the past 3 summers, I have seen the many changes that have occurred within the NASA organization. As I return each summer, I find that new programs and systems have been adapted to better serve the needs of the Center and of the Agency. The NASA Agency has transformed itself the past couple years with the implementation of the Integrated Financial Management Program (IFMP). IFMP is designed to allow the Agency to improve its management of its Financial, Physical, and Human Resources through the use of multiple enterprise module applications. With my mentor, Joseph Kan, being the branch chief of the Employees and Commercial Payments Branch, I have been exposed to several modules, such as Travel Manager, WebTads, and Core Financial/SAP, which were implemented in the last couple of years under the IFMP. The implementation of these agency-wide systems has sometimes proven to be troublesome. Prior to IFMP, each NASA Center utilizes their own systems for Payroll, Travel, Accounts Payable, etc. But with the implementation of the Integrated Financial Management Program, all the "legacy" systems had to be eliminated. As a result, a great deal of enhancement and preparation work is necessary to ease the transformation from the old systems to the new. All this work occurs simultaneously; for example, e-Payroll will "go live" in several months, but a system like Travel Manager will need to have information upgraded within the system to meet the requirements set by Headquarters. My assignments this summer have given me the opportunity to become involved with such work. So far, I have been given the opportunity to participate in projects resulting from a congressional request, several bankcard reconciliations, updating routing lists for Travel Manager, updating the majordomo list for Travel Manager approvers and point of contacts, and a NASA Headquarters project involving improper payments on firm fixed price contracts. Each of the projects that I have worked on this summer presents a different aspect of the work performed on a regular basis by members of this branch. Not only do I get to see the "big picture" of what occurs within the organization, but I also get to experience the "little stuff" that goes on here and throughout the NASA Agency.

Pho, Susan↗

Managing systems faults on the commercial flight deck: Analysis of pilots' organization and prioritization of fault management information

In rare instances, flight crews of commercial aircraft must manage complex systems faults in addition to all their normal flight tasks. Pilot errors in fault management have been attributed, at least in part, to an incomplete or inaccurate awareness of the fault situation. The current study is part of a program aimed at assuring that the types of information potentially available from an intelligent fault management aiding concept developed at NASA Langley called 'Faultfinde' (see Abbott, Schutte, Palmer, and Ricks, 1987) are an asset rather than a liability: additional information should improve pilot performance and aircraft safety, but it should not confuse, distract, overload, mislead, or generally exacerbate already difficult circumstances.

Rogers, William H.↗