The Science Discovery Engine: Connecting Heterogeneous Scientific Data and Information 

Transformative science often occurs at the boundaries of different disciplines. Making interdisciplinary science data, software and documentation discoverable and accessible is essential to enabling transformative science. However, connecting this diverse and heterogeneous information is often a challenge due to several factors including the dispersed and sometimes isolated nature of data and the semantic differences between topical areas. NASA’s Science Discovery Engine (SDE) has developed several approaches to tackling these challenges. The SDE is a unified, insightful search experience that enables discovery of NASA’s open science data across five topical areas: astrophysics, biological and physical sciences, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary science. In this presentation, we will discuss our efforts to develop a systematic scientific curation workflow to integrate diverse content into a single search environment. We will also share lessons learned from our work to create a metadata crosswalk across the five disciplines.