ISIS3 and VICAR integration thoughts for the TSC

[thareUSGS]

Motivation:
The goal of a better integrated VICAR/ISIS3 would expand both software’s capabilities across Planetary and Earth disciplines, simplify their use, help to modernize the computing architectures, reduce software maintenance and Open Source support costs, and provide a new/improved software foundation for future users and data processing.

• The VICAR and ISIS software represent decades of dedicated NASA and USGS mission activities and untold technological developments and achievements.
• There are no commercial equivalents to these critical resources.
• The goal is to integrate, then simplify the complex process of Planetary and Earth calibration, registration, and image processing, and make it accessible to researchers, universities and the public.

Alignment with Strategic Plan:

• Goal 1: Reduce mission operations cost and risk.
• Goal 2: Leverage and be consistent with technological advances.
• Goal 3: Broaden use-cases to support to future missions (in-situ and orbital)
• Goal 4: Employ a principled architectural approach

Task Descriptions

• Coordinate NASA/USGS inter-agency management.
• Coordinate NASA/JPL with this Technical Steering Committee (TSC).
• Develop and support an active (Open Source) user community
• JPL tasks include Integrating VICAR components (Mainline; Mars; AFIDS/Geocal; NEST), integrating with ISIS3, and coordinating with PDS.
• USGS/ASC tasks include better integrating with VICAR and building an integrated open user support infrastructure.
• Key joint activities include designing and developing integrated Use-Cases; modernizing, maintaining, and supporting software.
• Plan for future enhancements (e.g., 3D Visualization, cloud services, other integrations).

Implementation Approach:

• Integrate VICAR/ISIS file formats (allow for better interoperability for the short-term)
• Provide compatible environments (e.g. Anaconda) or VM/Docker implementations for cross-OS support.
• Consistent ‘build’ environment/GitHub
• Develop integrated Use-Case scripts for performing end-to-end planetary and earth calibration, mapping, GIS-preparation, and image processing applications (perhaps building on Python tools like pysis).
• Plan for library integration and sharing (e.g. Camera Models, ALE, geometry, matching, photometry, across In-situ and orbital, ...).
• Support web-based user access to software (cloud services).
• Support integrated PDS archive and format functionality.

[jlaura]

@thareUSGS We discussed this last night a bit. Others should weigh in as well, but this looks like it needs to be one or more RFCs with the respective projects. We will have docs generated for the scope/role of the TSC shortly.

What is it that these projects would like from the TSC?

[rbeyer]

Yes, this sounds like a potentially large project with a big footprint in a lot of ways. As Jay says, what exactly are you asking of us at this point? It seems to me that this ISIS / VICAR integration needs to be a little farther along before you might have concrete needs that the TSC can help with, but maybe I'm not interpreting it correctly? Can you say a little more about what you need from us now?

[jessemapel]

Expanding on what the others have said. Something we want the TSC to provide is a standard way to propose and iterate on large proposals like this. Right now we have the current RFC process in ISIS, but I think we can expand that to other projects and improve upon it.

[jessemapel]

I am closing this until the VICAR/ISIS teams come forward with a more concrete request.