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Another good data view might be site search.

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Hello,

Login Sessions

Seems like login sessions are less than an hour or two. Using the site would be more convenient if they were a week or even two.

Login Input Dialog

The tab from username (email) to password skips to browser bar url rather than "remember me" and then "login" button (on Safari).

Best wishes,
John

Concurrent Knowledge Based Engineering 

NASA and other space agencies and engineering organizations around the world have been continuously exploring methods and tools for collaborative effort. Space flight systems in particular are among the most complex and demanding engineering projects in the human experience.

Half the problems for review or solution in collaboration involve organizational structures and principles. While the other half involve methods and tools. One dynamic between the two may be described as tools being the capability of the organization: an organization can only implement methods for which practical and effective tools are available.

Knowledge based Engineering has been an active field in academia for decades. Aerospace engineering tools have benefitted from this work, including DS CATIA and other federated (centralized server) systems.

The development of the internet in the web has many lessons to offer, as well. Some mirror the lessons offered in academic and commercial work (federation), and through the analysis of activity and deduction of ideas.

Recently NASA and ESA have been working on Concurrent Engineering methods and tools to integrate team effort on complex systems problems. The problem being solved by a Concurrent Engineering methodology is the collection of diverse dependencies across a systemic complex for solution by the multidisciplinary team. In simpler cases, one person can get a system in mind for solution to the complex, sorting problems and solutions for a best fit result. In space flight systems the number of disciplines required prohibits this approach. A diverse team must work together on the problem complex to produce a solution complex for the resulting system. Predominantly there's a communication problem implied by this activity, as one team member expresses the character and significance of a known dependency or recognized conflict to the other interested members of the team.

Moving forward into NASA's new vision, there may be opportunities for more incremental collaboration between individuals, teams and organizations. The increasingly incremental collaboration shares increasingly smaller problems for evaluation and contribution. The goal of the approach is to minimize the marginal cost of collaboration. As a result, the marginal cost of engineering is expected to follow.

It is made possible by a knowledge based system. The knowledge based system organizes each engineering artifact and planning and design detail item into a homogeneous framework for an open variety of tools to access. The planning process includes organization of the objective, workflow, design and development of the project. The design process may include multiple solutions to the objective problem, each elaborating the objective knowledge with an independent avenue for development. Likewise, development work elaborates upon design knowledge.

Knowledge based systems are very powerful, but require an information architecture to succeed. Some knowledge systems are more convenient than others. Convenience and flexibility are critical to success.

The web could be conceived of as a collection of knowledge based systems. Certainly great exemplars of the conception are numerous. The integration of shared activity is well known and fairly well understood.

With concurrent engineering efforts, teams integrate. With knowledge based tools, integration can be increasingly incremental.

For example in this website, proposals are made in an hour and votes are cast in a minute. This level of incremental integration of effort is available to engineering via knowledge based tools.

The effort required to post an update may be hours or days, but is independent of the method, tools, and what can be accomplished in a variety of domains both open and closed.

The key idea in knowledge based engineering is that all project data is homologated and centralized for the benefit of tooling. Tools are oriented to a unified central process.

One example of such a system is a software code repository, another example is a website like this one, and of course DS CATIA and many systems work with centralized data stores.

The world of Google APIs is an example of how a unified data homologation (GData) benefits an open, expanding and evolving range of tools.

The idea is not new, but applying the idea to NASA's new vision requires work.

Certainly the open source software world can contribute with live examples and make the web a more interesting place.