A component framework supporting peer services for space data management

Knowledge discovery and data correlation require a unified approach to basic data management. However, achieving such an approach is nearly impossible with hundreds of disparate data sources, legacy systems and data formats. This problem is pervasive in the space science community where data models, taxonomies and data management systems are locally implemented and limited metadata has been collected and organized. Technology developed by the Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) task at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been exploring component frameworks for managing, locating and exchanging data residing within a geographically distributed network. OODT has taken a novel approach towards solving this problem by exploiting Web technologies usually dedicated to e-commerce, combined with a rich, metadata-based environment. The components developed by OODT create a set of distributed peer-to-peer services that allow for data managed by a peer to be searched and returned as part of an integrated data management system. This paper discusses the approach taken to develop a software framework, and two prototype development efforts for the Planetary Data System (PDS) and the Mission and Ground Asset Database.