XSearch: A System for Searching and Interrelating NASA Mission Operations Data

To perform their duties, flight controllers for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station routinely need to locate specific operations documents and records from among tens of thousands available. Relevant information, in the form of team notes, console logs, action requests, anomaly reports, and flight procedures, is stored in heterogeneous databases and accessed using varying tools with differing interfaces. Users must consult these different systems and manually integrate results together to get a comprehensive view of relevant information. To improve access to flight control information, we have designed and built an application, XSearch, that integrates data from disparate flight operations databases. Through a common search interface, Mission Control personnel using XSearch can issue a single search query and simultaneously interrogate multiple mission operations data sources. The initial version of XSearch is planned for deployment in NASA’s Mission Control Center in mid-2008, and will allow Shuttle and Station flight controllers to search simultaneously across three key mission operations data sources: the ChitS system (used to store mission action requests), the Flight Notes system (used to store internal flight control team communications), and the Anomaly Reporting System. These systems store historical data back to 2002, and contain over 100,000 records in total. XSearch users can perform full-text searches on key text fields (e.g. title, problem description, action request, etc.) and view integrated results across these data sources. In addition to conducting search, the system provides two other important capabilities that are intended to contextualize search results: detection of cross-references and detection of textually similar records. Identifying records that are either cross-referenced by, or similar to, a given search result enables flight controllers to recover key information about the operational context associated with that result. The goal of contextualization is to facilitate safer and more effective mission operations decision-making through enhanced situation awareness. To detect embedded cross-references within results, XSearch parses text fields found in the results using a set of syntactic patterns that identify citations (e.g., patterns that detect controlled document or record identifiers routinely used by authors). Using this technique, XSearch can identify both "outbound" and "inbound" references. Outbound references point “out” from a specific chit, flight note, or anomaly to other records; "inbound” references point “in” to the specific item from other records. To detect records that appear similar to a given search result, XSearch calculates and ranks the textual similarity between the result and all other records in the corpus; those ranked highest are displayed to the flight controller. Similarity detection is computed using a standard cosine-based vector space information retrieval method weighted by term