Related Projects: Program Management Tool (PMT)

One of the biggest challenges facing any organization today is how to manage and integrate an ever-increasing amount of information, especially when this information is in a variety of data types and formats. Departments and divisions within an organization usually have their own information systems, many of which were not designed to be able to communicate and exchange information. In addition, Legacy information systems contain years, if not decades, of historical organizational information that is typically stored in complex, cumbersome and outdated information systems. Individuals generate still more data via e-mail, text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and a wide variety of other applications.

Research being conducted in Integrated Information Management Systems develops innovative techniques and applications for integrating disparate information systems, whether their data is structured, semi-structured or unstructured.

In ongoing collaborative efforts with NASA and various industry and educational partners, integrated information management systems technology is going from the research lab into widespread service across the agency, and to industry, academia and other government agencies as well. Data translation and transformation algorithms are being used to integrate legacy information systems, relational database systems built on a variety of platforms, and unstructured data such as text documents, spreadsheets, PDF documents and presentations. Combined with advanced search algorithms that can perform searches based on both context and the content of data, these systems are offering an unprecedented look at information within NASA. The result is that data analysis, retrieval and reuse have been improved exponentially, while operational and support costs for system maintenance have been substantially decreased.

While this ground-breaking work is providing dramatic benefits for NASA, it can also provide dramatic benefits for any organization that needs to integrate and analyze information from disparate data sources.