CUBIST: Implementation and evaluation of a semantic business intelligence system for payload operations

Abstract

The Solar Monitoring Observatory, or in short SOLAR, was among the first Columbus payloads switched on after Columbus installation in February 2008, and continues to perform science until today. The Belgian User Support and Operations Centre (B.USOC, Brussels), responsible for the support of the SOLAR operations, uses, like every mission control centre, heterogeneous sources of information, including structured and unstructured data, for decision making and information tracking. Very large volumes of data are obtained, especially with the SOLAR telemetry data which are generated every second over long periods of time.Today, during real-time operations, the SOLAR operator constructs a mental model of the current operational status. Unfortunately, no software can provide a bird's eye view of the operations, nor combine in a unified application the most important operational information. In an anomalous situation, the first actions consist of bringing all the data together, such as experiment telemetry, user and operations manuals, console logs, configuration status, experiment execution planning, etc. Thus, a lot of time and effort is spent on the retrieval of data for real-time and post-analysis information, prior to the actual analysis. The Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) project envisions combining the two worlds of Business Intelligence (BI) and Semantic Technologies. The objective of CUBIST is to aggregate various information sources available to operators in mission control rooms using technologies based on semantic web standards. Aggregated data, ready for the BI processing, are expected to provide online support - via an online, web based unified interface - for making better decisions, reveal hitherto undiscovered information and provide supportive evidence in debriefing and decision making processes related to the organisation of space control centre operations.