This project, developing an initial demonstration prototype, aims to make a first step towards an Instrument that will enable intelligent decision-making in disaster mitigation, greatly benefiting society at large. The enabled research will benefit applications in environmental monitoring, transportation, education, agriculture, urban planning, and public health and safety. This project will contribute to further broaden the mission of education, recruitment, retention and mentoring by engaging more minority students in research, by reaching out to local schools, media, and the Internet, and by engaging the students with industrial collaborators. Prior work on the TerraFly web-based data dissemination tools in this minority-serving and internationally-geared institution affords the researchers and students experience in disseminating large projects to a broad audience, leveraging coverage received by worldwide media.Specifically, the project identifies the required datasets, allowing researchers to specify geographical and temporal selection and the multiple data types to be mashed up, and the analytical functions that may be developed or uploaded by the user. The Instrument will be built on top of TerraFly, inheriting its modules of Data Store, Mapping, High Performance Query, API, Spatial Join, Rooftop Geocoding, Data Drilldown, and Spatiotemporal Visualizer. The eventual Instrument will be an integrated system, comprised of: a server farm; a massive database containing contributed and created datasets; a fleet of balloon-borne aerial platforms streaming multi-spectral imagery and environmental measurements; modules for batch and ad-hoc data analytics and knowledge extraction; and a TerraFly extension to display and query super-resolution aerial imagery in the context of thousands of other datasets. The present Demonstration Prototype of the Instrument will include a large database containing sample contributed and created datasets; acquisition of imagery from several balloon-borne sensors, and a TerraFly extension to display and query super-resolution aerial imagery in the context of several other datasets. While the Demonstration Prototype will involve only several balloon-borne sensors in the airspace of the Institution, a design will be elaborated to prevent any air traffic and environmental problems in the broader deployment of untethered balloons in the eventual Instrument. The Demonstration Prototype will acquire, load, store, analyze, process, create, and serve geospatial data, including: traditional raster and vector geospatial data, sample geo-projected video streams, high-resolution data contributed by NASA, sample super-resolution aerial imagery contributed by committed industrial partners, and sample analyzed geo-referenced documents. Under prior funding, the TerraFly Geospatial Data Management project pioneered a number of technologies that became role models for later deployment by major mapping providers. The proposed Prototype is of an Instrument that would deploy an order-of-magnitude sharper aerial imagery, which will enable vast new applications and analytics. Due to its non-invasive low-altitude super-resolution sensing and automatic knowledge extraction, the Instrument will enable multi-disciplinary research of twelve groups.
