NASA SBIR 2015 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Azavea, Inc.
340 North 12th Street, Suite 402B
Philadelphia, PA 19107 - 1102
(215) 925-2600

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Robert Cheetham
cheetham@azavea.com
340 North 12th Street, Suite 402B
Philadelphia, PA 19107 - 1102
(215) 701-7713

CORPORATE/BUSINESS OFFICIAL (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Robert Cheetham
cheetham@azavea.com
340 North 12th Street, Suite 402B
Philadelphia, PA 19107 - 1102
(215) 701-7713

Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) at beginning and end of contract:
Begin: 5
End: 8

Technology Available (TAV) Subtopics
Earth Science Applied Research and Decision Support is a Technology Available (TAV) subtopic that includes NASA Intellectual Property (IP). Do you plan to use the NASA IP under the award?
No

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
In order to promote and facilitate broader use of NASA and other Earth observation data sources, the Phase I research focused on development of a cloud-based distributed computation platform for building, storing, and executing complex geospatial models. Widespread access to frequent, high-resolution Earth observation imagery has created the need for innovative tools like ModelLab that will help individuals and organizations to effectively access, analyze, edit, and visualize remotely sensed data in transformative new ways without years of specialized training or ongoing investments in proprietary software and technology infrastructure. The Phase II production application will be built as an on-demand, browser-based service that provides a unique assemblage of online authoring tools, searchable libraries of geospatial modeling functions, educational materials, distributed computing capabilities enabled by the open source GeoTrellis framework, and access to NASA and other sensor data that can be applied to contemporary geospatial challenges in a broad range of domains. 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. Specific goals for Phase II include adding a searchable gallery of geospatial models that can be harnessed to perform specific tasks, enhancing the user experience, adding support for user data upload, extending the data repository with national and global-scale datasets, providing access to NASA APIs, enabling multi-band processing capabilities, and performing iterative testing with an expanded Advisory Team and a larger group of students and potential customers.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
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 Earth science education 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.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
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 direct sales to 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. In addition to direct sales, OEM and licensing agreements with satellite and mapping firms will integrate ModelLab?s modeling capabilities with third-party products and services.