1. Patrick Hogan Project Manager World Wind

3. Jim Gray was a software genius at Microsoft Research. His job was to do whatever he wanted. His primary research interests were in databases and transaction processing systems -- with a particular focus on using computers to make scientists more productive. He received the Turing Award in 1998, essentially the Nobel for software engineering. In January of 2007 he took his 40-foot sailboat Tenacious on a trip to the Farallon Islands. He never returned. While he was here with us, his mantra was for scientists and engineers to work collaboratively in finding increasingly smarter ways to apply ourselves to large scientific databases.

4. One thing Jim wanted to see delivered was a digital survey of the sky, and if you think of the complexity of space out to the edge of our universe, that’s one heck of a database. Coincidentally, in April of 2004, I contacted the Space Telescope Science Institute for how NASA World Wind might visualize the SkyServer and National Virtual Observatory data. They suggested I talk with Jim Gray. As a result and due in great part to Jim’s leadership and Microsoft’s support, in early 2006 World Wind was able to let anyone travel through space and time to the limits of our known universe. The reason this happened was a result of collaborative efforts between the open source community of World Wind hackers (I mean software engineers) and the research scientists who were managing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database. All made possible due to the driving force of one man, Jim Gray, brilliant and ever thoughtful. Now, more than ever, we need to rejuvenate his mantra of scientists and engineers working together to solve large problems. Today, we have problems that need Jim’s planetary scale of thinking, such as climate change and clean energy. If World Wind has a mantra, it is to provide the technology needed for scientists and engineers to help us better understand and better live in this world.

13. So what are we doing wrong?

14. NASA creates highly sophisticated software and, by definition, it’s typically highly specialized. This means it may not be readily applicable to other uses. NASA software development efforts might inspire greater collaboration with the world community if those efforts were to ‘boil down’ functionalities to an API-centric ‘generic platform’ so that the larger community could readily apply this platform to other applications. This would also benefit ongoing advancement of that ‘generic platform,’ the wheel that need not be reinvented, but only made more round. And because this is an evolving platform it will increasingly serve the needs of NASA and the world community. Additionally, the generic nature to the platform would also help address ITAR issues. This is the approach World Wind has taken, generic technology as an API-centric SDK. After all, the NASA motto is ‘for the benefit of all.’ Lastly and yet again, as MITRE well advised DoD, “Use a common, well-known OSS license. . .don’t write your own!” NASA software engineers should be able to choose from a suite of approved open source licenses.