Knowledge Mining Application in ISHM testbed

The scope of integrated system health management (ISHM) is the end-to-end autonomous management of subsystems, systems and systems of systems. Among ISHM's components is management of data, information, and knowledge to detect and diagnose anomalies, and propose mitigation procedures for crew implementation. Complex systems such as the International Space Station (ISS) generate a large amount of data, over 160,000 documents that are distributed across disparate systems. But this data is fragmented and applications are unable to interoperate. In addition, the lack of a seamless mechanism for ensuring use of latest, best information hinders development of much needed modeling, simulation and visualization systems that could increase the operating safety of a complex system. To reduce development time for ISHM systems, builders of advanced diagnostic systems require rapid retrieval of precise information from various sources spread across multiple, distributed, heterogeneous databases. To meet this challenge, a technological leap that goes beyond the bounds of today's understanding of documents is needed. Software developed by NASA Ames researchers in the Advanced Knowledge Exploration Networks (AKEN) Lab that enables diagnostic systems and distributed information sources to be linked into an information grid is one such technology. Funded through the Integrated Testbed Prototypes (ITP) Project, in 2005 AKEN installed Netmark's context based retrieval system at Johnson Space Center to incorporate this technology into advanced diagnostic systems. For the ITP Project this technology was given the name Knowledge Mining Application (KMA). KMA was responsible for integrating documents from a range of information sources so that an advanced caution and warning diagnostic system could retrieve precise information on ISS events in question.