Chapter 12. Powering NASA science data systems
This chapter covers
- The Planetary Data System
- The Earth Science Enterprise systems
- How Tika fits in
Welcome to the first of four deep dives showing Tika’s use in a real-world system. We’ll assume that, by now, you have a firm grasp of what Tika can do, how you can use its functionality in your application, and how you can extend Tika and add new functionality to it.
In this chapter, we’ll spend less time covering Tika’s nuts and bolts, and we’ll spend more time showing you how a real-world, huge-scale organization like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) uses Tika in some of its newer, large-scale data system efforts.
One of Tika’s flagship deployments has been within NASA. We’ve used Tika to help power search for NASA’s Planetary Data System, the archive for all planetary science information collected over the past 40 years. Tika’s helped us extract information from PDS datasets and index them for a revamp of PDS’s search architecture, helping to turn its online data distribution system into a Google-like, free-text and facet-based search. We’ll explain Tika’s role in this revamp early in the chapter.