Description: The availability of geospatial data has increased dramatically over the past half-century, and so has the size of individual datasets. The ability to gather, store, access, and analyze these large geospatial datasets provides unprecedented opportunities for innovation and understanding that are only partially addressed by existing geospatial data processing tools and public cloud computing platforms. The ModelLab will address this concern by providing an entirely new type of user experience that will make geospatial modeling capabilities available not only to trained geospatial professionals, but also to non-technical users in a broad range of public and private sector positions. Further, it will both simplify and shorten the development process for a host of model-driven software applications by providing developers with a growing catalog of well-crafted models to build and innovate from.

Benefits: The proposed ModelLab will support NASA applications across three critical areas of interest. First, it will address NASA's need for creative new methodologies that can harness computing power necessary to process large geospatial datasets efficiently. Efficiency in this context is largely a matter of faster processing times, and the proposed project promises to increase these speeds significantly for geospatial modeling. Second, it can assist the Langley Research Center's GIS Team, which is recognized as a leader in GIS technology. ModelLab will be designed for integration with existing geospatial data processing toolkits from both commercial and academic sources that can be aligned with Langley objectives on a project-by-project basis. Finally, ModelLab will be a tremendous addition to NASA's open data resources by providing a catalogue of geospatial models that can be used to support internal research, classroom study, and public outreach activities with available NASA datasets.

The combined user base for the ModelLab touches on aspects of virtually every government, academic, nonprofit, and commercial discipline and includes millions of individuals in organizations around the world. Broad commercialization will focus on government, commercial, and nonprofit organizations that need to process and analyze large environmental datasets for applications ranging from climate change and risk assessment to watershed management and regional planning. Local governments in particular will provide a major marketing opportunity. Therefore, outreach efforts will be directed at the GIS, Water, Transportation, and Planning/Zoning Departments within these government units that are most likely to be facing critical geospatial data processing challenges. Other markets will include Homeland Security and Defense, public health, environmental research and technology, and carbon management organizations that require new tools that can provide actionable intelligence from large geospatial datasets.