NASA Technology Transfer System: Under the hood

摘要

This paper discusses the modern approach of the implementation NASA Technology Transfer System as a Software as a Service (SaaS) for NASA as a way to reduce cost and increase efficiency. To accommodate scalability and flexibility, a private cloud called XML Datastore (XD) is used as the foundation to provide a SaaS framework. This is implemented to support three verticals, which consists of the NASA Office of Chief Technology, the NASA Office of Chief Engineer and the NASA Office of General Council for a streamlined technology transfer process. The private cloud/SaaS implementation deploys the software as an application hosted on NASA''s internal networks. External services to NASA (non-intramural cloud services) failed to provide a guarantee for responsibility for any accountability inherited against safeguarding the sensitive nature of NASA data. But similar to external cloud services, NTTS eliminates the need to install independently stove piped applications by each NASA center and alleviates the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support for each individual NASA center. From a NASA software acquisition perspective, NASA uses a combination of open source software as well as some specific NASA plug-in, on-demand software. This paper briefly describes how NTTS is supported using the XML Datastore (XD) Framework. XD Framework is an open and extensible database architecture that supports efficient and flexible integration of heterogeneous and distributed information resources. As a fact, XD Framework provides a “schema-less” datastore approach using a document-centered object-relational XML database mapping. This enables structured, unstructured, and semi-structured information to be integrated without requiring document schemas or translation tables. XD Framework utilizes existing international protocol standards of the World Wide Web Consortium Architecture Domain and the Internet Engineering Task Force, primarily HTTP, XML and - ebDAV. Through a combination of these international protocols, universal database record identifiers, and physical address data types, XD enables an unlimited number of desktops and distributed information sources to be linked seamlessly and efficiently into an information grid. XD Framework has been used to create a powerful set of novel information management systems for a variety of scientific and engineering applications.