This work contributes to scientific data processing technology through the development of an extensible toolkit of database operators to capture, clean and manipulate scientific data, and through the study of mechanisms for interactive, real-time scientific processing, such as parallelization and flow control. This work builds on the experience of the research team in gathering and processing spacecraft data and in developing extensible database technologies as part of the Volcano project. The team includes a graduate student in computer science who has worked extensively at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) of the University of Colorado on spacecraft operations and data management projects. The focus of this project is on the development of new database technologies which can be accomplished by combining real-time and database query processing techniques. The key results of this work will include: (1) techniques for enhancing the responsiveness of database query operations, (2) tools to enable a scientist to capture and process huge amounts of scientific data such as those received from a spacecraft, and to process these data interactively, and (3) an extensible toolkit of database operations (such as capture, clean, relate, manipulate, and display scientific data sets) to facilitate analysis of the complex data sets required to understand complex scientific issues such as global ozone depletion.
