Intelligent systems technologies to assist in utilization of Earth observation data

With the launch of several Earth observing satellites over the last decade, we are now in a "data rich" environment. From NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites alone, we are accumulating more than 3.5 TB per day of raw data and derived geophysical parameters. The data products are being distributed to a large user community that includes scientific researchers, educators and operational government agencies. Notable progress has been made in the last decade in facilitating access to data. However, to realize the full potential of the growing archives of valuable scientific data, further progress is necessary in the transformation of data into information, and information into knowledge that can be used in particular applications. This paper discusses the concept of an Intelligent Archive in the context of a Knowledge Building system (IA-KBS), with six key capabilities: Virtual Product Generation, Significant Event Detection, Automated Data Quality Assessment, Large-Scale Data Mining, Dynamic Feedback Loop, and Data Discovery and Efficient Requesting. Technologies enabling these capabilities are identified. Many of these technologies are in development today by NSF, NASA and industry sponsorship. These can be taken advantage of for evolving the current generation of data and information systems into the visionary IA-KBS.