Data Discovery Platform

Project Management & Design | Geospatial | 2022-2024

Led product design for a data catalog platform used by researchers to search and filter data products, designing interactive search and discovery workflows.

Backstory

Airborne data is metadata about the Earth’s surface and atmosphere gathered through the deployment of platforms (often aircrafts) and instruments (such as sensors). Compared to the large swaths of data captured by satellites, this form of remote sensing is generally localized and context specific. Raw data collected from the field can be processed and shared with other scientists for research, it can also provide ground truthing to what is observed from satellites. This initiative—managed by NASA’s Airborne Data Management Group (AMDG)—was born out of a need to improve access to airborne and field observations. Examples of air, land, and water-based platforms like balloons, planes, station land sites, and buoys.

Goals

• To improve airborne data management and stewardship
• Build a public search interface of airborne and field campaigns
• Build an internal maintenance interface for data admins to curate and manage content

Key Challenges

• Data documentation can be incomplete, missing, or hard to find
• Archived data is dispersed across data archive centers with varying formats
• Difficult to access to airborne scientists

My Role

I joined the project after its initial release and stepped into the dual role of project lead and designer for the team, partnering closely with the core team. For over two years, I led feature definition and UI/UX design for system improvements, both incremental and larger scale. I also participated in quarterly planning sessions to make sure that development planning fit within the broader team goals. On a weekly basis, I led sessions on design and development feedback and progress.

A Few Key Learnings

1. Science keywords aren't just single words, they consist of an entire path of words (E.g. “Earth Science > Atmosphere > Air Quality”). In order for keyword searches to be accurate and contextual, the UI needed to focus on words in the context of an entire string of text, not just single words.

2. The admin UI displayed information to reflect the underlying system rather than admin experience. Changes were logged as new records to a table, resulting in repeated rows of the same data campaigns. Curators got confused by repeated information, it was too easy to update the wrong records. The interface needed to shift from being engineering-oriented to user-oriented. One particular change was to only display the latest record of a data campaign and move past drafts into a history section so that edits were always made to the latest version.

Outcome

The ADMG was awarded the 2022 NASA Silver Group Achievement Award for “excellence and teamwork in the development and implementation of a knowledge center for NASA airborne and field campaign data”. In 2023, the platform transitioned from beta to full public release. The metadata inventory has continued to grow to include contextual metadata for past and new airborne and field campaigns.

A few projects I supported:

1. Incorporating a data products search view
2. Showing the visual flight tracks of planes and other platforms that have been deployed to collect data
3. Making sure that updates to NASA’s official science keywords database were updated in CASEI.
4. Planning for the future state of the platform