Ruth E Duerr, Kaylin Bugbee, Mark Parsons, Daniel Berrios, Ashish Acharya, Emily Foshee, Anirudh Prabhu and Ahmed Eliesh

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has established a long-term goal of developing and implementing capabilities that enable open science across NASA’s scientific disciplines. The SMD has five divisions including Earth Science, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, Astrophysics, and the Biological and Physical Sciences. Each division within SMD produces, examines and catalogs tens of petabytes of data to fulfill scientific objectives and provide scientific findings to millions of people. Currently, access to these data tends to be discipline and division specific. There currently are no mechanisms that provide discovery and access to heterogeneous scientific data from across all five divisions. Working towards such mechanisms and helping to cultivate a strong community of practice across SMD to share recommended practices and discuss common strategies is the goal of the project described here. This project is using semantics to prototype cross-divisions discovery methods based on user submitted use cases that are explored in a series of workshops involving domain, data, and semantic expertise. Two use cases will be explored over the summer. The first attempts to discover biological sample data acquired during periods when the International Space Station was flying through relatively high radiation environments such as the South Atlantic Anomaly. The second involves discovering atmospheric data from planets both within and outside our solar system. Between these two use cases, data from all five divisions is needed.