Approaches for Enabling Interoperable Enterprise Data Search: Insights from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Catalog Project

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is working to build an open-source science infrastructure to enable open, collaborative and interdisciplinary science. One key component in the open-source science infrastructure is the SMD data catalog project. The SMD data catalog project is building an integrated SMD enterprise search capability to enable discovery of open data across SMD’s five divisions, including Astrophysics, Biological and Physical Sciences, Earth Science, Heliophysics and Planetary Science. In order to efficiently integrate heterogeneous data types across the SMD enterprise, the SMD data catalog project considered three approaches for implementation including semantic mapping, graph data stores and Cognitive Search capabilities. In this presentation, we will describe the SMD data catalog project business case, the three identified technical approaches and our assessment of those approaches. We will also provide a summary of the overall technical assessment process so that it may inform other agencies and organizations who may be implementing similar initiatives.