“Your organization’s performance, reliability and professionalism are the chief reasons that we have extended our working relationship with Matrix.” Dynamac Corp.

Client: Awarded the Life Science Services Contract (LSSC) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, Dynamac Corporation is responsible for a broad range of natural resources management activities, including operation of GIS, remote-sensing, and environmental decision-support laboratories.

Challenge: Within a given environmental project or initiative, source data may originate from many different forms such as, field notes, electronic monitoring equipment data streams, and laboratory analysis results. The format and layout of these data typically differ, sometimes enormously.

In long-term studies, data inconsistencies often compound these problems. A specific dataset may have been simultaneously maintained in different software products and media such as, Excel spreadsheets, dBase databases, Access databases, ASCII files, and paper. Further, the data within each storage method may have been represented inconsistently. Due to the intense complexity and effort required to translate just two different thematic datasets into a common structure for analysis, the ability to compare data across themes was usually difficult, often impractical, and sometimes impossible. Often, these efforts are judged to be beyond the ability or budget of available resources and thus not pursued.

Consequently, there was a growing demand for the long-term storage and reuse of raw scientific data, a need to provide a consistent data management/development approach across datasets, and support for ISO 9000 / ISO 14001 compliance requirements.

A unified scientific database model would help address this problem. However, existing scientific data models for measurements such as water quality, hydro-meteorological observations and measurements, laboratory analysis results, and so on, were found to be “theme-specific”. While they serve their own unique requirements, significant limitations are inherent in their respective specialized approaches. Design and development of a new, multi-thematic, and highly flexible model was required.

Solution: Matrix designed and developed the innovative Environmental Integrated Data Model (EIM) for unifying all of KSC's LSSC environmental and scientific metrics data. The EIM is unique in the way fundamental scientific research analysis and monitoring measurement parameters of many types may be abstracted into a single, unified collection of discrete measurement dataset objects. These measurement dataset objects are related within the model to higher-level thematic location and measurement method metadata, which is in turn, associated with the activity from which they were collected.

Key Features: The EIM has evolved into a uniquely innovative science and research data collection, storage, and retrieval model. It is the only data model of its kind that effectively assimilates vastly disparate multi-thematic and multi-dimensional analytical study and monitoring data into a common, unified relational database design.

Other features include:

• A “cookie-cutter” dataset development approach resulting in shorter development times, better meta documentation, and higher quality assurance
• Common interfaces that provide more consistent and easier user access to data
• Better overall awareness of environmental data management and retrieval practices
• Increased user confidence and usability
• Cross analysis of disparate datasets
• Reliable data to drive Environmental Management Systems and ISO 9000 / ISO 14001 programs