Searching Across the International Space Station Databases

Data access in the enterprise requires us to combine data from different sources and different formats. It is advantageous to focus on the intersection of the knowledge across sources and domains; identifying appropriately related knowledge and ignoring irrelevant knowledge, which distracts and serves to make the integration unwieldy and more complicated than necessary. A contextualized search over multiple domains is proposed in this paper-using context-sensitive queries to support disciplined manipulation of domain knowledge resources. The objective of a context search is to provide the capability to interrogate many largely semantically disjoint domain knowledge resources in an automated and intelligent fashion. The intelligent search system detailed supports formally the tasks of selecting, combining, extending, specializing, and modifying components from a diverse set of domains. This paper demonstrates a new paradigm in composition of information for enterprise applications. In particular, it discusses an approach to achieve data integration across multiple sources in a manner that does not require heavy investment in application, database, and middleware maintenance. This lean approach to integration leads to cost-effective and scalable data integration with an underlying schema-less object-relational database management system. This highly scalable information on demand system framework, called NX-Search, is an implementation of an information system built on NETMARK. NETMARK is a flexible, high-throughput open database integration framework for managing, storing, and searching unstructured or semi-structured arbitrary XML and HTML used widely at the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) and industry.