Cynthia Y. Cheung, Richard A. White, David Leisawitz (NASA GSFC), Nick Roussopoulos, Stephen Kelley (UMIACS), Gail Reichert, James Blackwell (Raytheon STX)
Reference URL: http://amase.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The Astrophysics Multispectral Archive Search Engine, AMASE, is a metadata base prototype built using object-oriented database (OODB) methodology which allows mission data to be searched easily by scientific parameters. Fundamental astronomical measurements are captured from published astronomical catalogs and mission paramaters are obtained from NASA mission logs to be used as search criteria. A rich astronomical classification scheme is also built into the database to support the search.
We discuss the implementation issues that arise in integrating heterogeneous data sources in AMASE: the form and contents of metadata; the creation of cross-system object identifiers; the specific tools that we have developed to handle bulk loading and incremental data loading into an OODB; interoperability with relational databases; and some of our future work to extend the capabilities of AMASE.