PDS and NASA Tournament Laboratory Progress in Engaging Developers to Provide Ne

Use the link to access more information about the article from SAO/ADS. The abstract reads as follows: "The Planetary Data System (PDS), working through the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) and TopCoder® , used challenge-based competition to generate an optimized data base and API for comet data at the PDS Small Bodies Node (SBN). Additional, follow-on contests challenged the competitors to create new, transparent, agile tools for public access to NASA’s planetary data, where 'public' includes not just researchers, but also students and educators. Since the initial start-up last year, the installation at SBN now provides ready access to the comet data holdings of the SBN, and has introduced new users and new developers to PDS data. We report on recent developments arising from that first success. Specifically, the experience gained in that process is being applied to establishing a second installation at the PDS Planetary Rings Node (Rings), to serve as the basis for a new series of challenges - this time to develop similar access tools at Rings to make the growing archive of CASSINI images available through the API; and to develop a crowd-sourcing project with eventual application across the PDS holdings."