NASA Regional Applications Center At FIU: Objectives

A major barrier to the wider use of Earth remote sensing data is timely access to satellite data products that can be combined easily with other resource management applications already in use by the general user community.

RAC objectives are based on an overall goal of fostering the self supporting use of environmental and Earth resource data by regional institutions including state and local government, universities, consortia and commercial companies. These objectives include:

Promoting the establishment of self-sustaining public and private sector working relationships to broaden user access to NASA data.
Refining and transferring NASA technology through collaborative testbedding.
Using RAC-created, in situ and ancillary databases to support the calibration and validation of NASA satellite data.
Incorporating RAC applied research results into shareable global environment knowledge bases.
Stimulating the development of associated commercial activities.

The mission of the RAC at FIU is to collaborate with NASA GSFC in serving public and business needs for remote sensing data obtained by NASA, primarily from orbiting satellites. There is a vast amount of historical data and an ever increasing stream of potentially useful and valuable data due to planned satellite launches. To be rendered useful this data needs to be pre-processed, catalogued, stored, and made available for searching and direct access. In addition, further specialized processing is required depending on the ultimate use of the data, for example for oil exploration or agricultural and other resource management. It is planned that the advanced database technology being developed at FIU under NASA support will be used in the RAC, strengthening both projects.

Setting Up Affiliate Program

One of the most important goals of the RAC is to ultimately become self supporting. It is authorized and planned that this be accomplished by developing customers for data and the value added processing provided by experts, both at FIU and via external individuals and organizations. To achieve this goal an Affiliate program will be established in order to identify entities interested in remote sensing data and to work collaboratively with them to discover how to provide and process the data of interest. Initially the affiliates will sign a letter of interest declaring that they will join with the RAC to make the effort to achieve this preliminary goal. It is anticipated that there will be individual and group meetings of their personnel, RAC principals and experts in applications of remote sensing data. As valuable data applications are identified and methodologies are refined, it is planned that some of the affiliates will choose to become paying customers for data and for expert data processing. Others such as regional educational institutions may elect to freely access data which the RAC is able to make available, such as a large volume of weather data.

Use the FIU High-performance Semantic Database System

At FIU's HPDRC Center we are currently developing a massively parallel database management system based on the semantic model, with applications to earth sciences. Abundant evidence demonstrates that semantic/object-oriented databases can better satisfy the needs of scientific applications (such as strong semantics embedded in the databases and efficient storage/retrieval of non-conventional data) than relational databases. The semantic database management system is to be used as the core data management system of the RAC in performing various data processing activities including data fusion, ingestion, and archive; data retrieval, querying, and mining; data publishing and dissemination; as well as image rendering and visualization.