NASA SBIR 2008 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Traclabs, Inc.
8620 N. New Braunfels, Suite 603
San Antonio, TX 78217 - 3586
(210) 822-2310

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Debra Schreckenghost
schreck@traclabs.com
8620 N. New Braunfels, Suite 603
San Antonio, TX 78217 - 3586
(832) 415-0109

Expected Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upon completion of contract: 2 to 3

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Incidents related to impaired human performance in space operations can be caused by environmental conditions, situational challenges, and operational deficiencies. Detecting, reporting, and correlating related incidents are key to preventing future incidents. NASA has made significant progress in standardizing the reporting of aviation incidents by developing electronic forms for reporting incidents. While such forms improve report consistency, incident data are not represented in a way that enables computer-based reasoning across reports (e.g., automatic linking of related reports.) TRACLabs proposes to develop a human factors incident-reporting tool for gathering incident data, documenting data in incident reports, and archiving incident data. We will define an XML-based semantic language for incident reporting to capture information about human factors incidents, including multi-modal data. We will develop software for authoring incident reports using this language, archiving these reports, and searching the archives using incident semantics. This project is innovative in defining an incident reporting language that uses an ontology-based vocabulary. This enables improved tools for gathering incident data, and for authoring and archiving incident reports. The semantic indexing provided by the use of incident reporting language permits more sophisticated search of archives, including automatic identification of prior incidents potentially relevant to the current incident.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Incident reporting is an important part of handling issues that arise during missions. It can be challenging, however, to capture incident information accurately and to discover similarities between an incident and prior incidents. These challenges are not specific to human factors incidents but are endemic in other types of incident reporting at NASA, including the reporting of space operations incidents, safety infractions, and accident investigations. The proposed incident reporting language and authoring tools can be applied for these other types of incident reporting. The language for capturing incident knowledge can be adapted by adjusting the domain ontologies used to represent the contents of incident categories. The authoring tools that produce reports using the incident reporting language can be used without change with new domain ontologies. The use of XML to develop the incident reporting language enables extending the language by adding tags for the special information needs of new domains.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Commercial tools for incident reporting are available in a diverse range of domains from crime incidents to corporate security incidents to customer complaints. Like the proposed software, most of these products support electronic submission and reporting of incident data, and archival of incident reports. The proposed approach differs from these commercial tools in providing a semantic basis for customization and improved search, and in representing incidents in an XML-based language. Such capabilities permit applying much of the incident reporting software developed for NASA in non-NASA applications. Promising applications include reporting incidents arising in chemical and nuclear plants, such as incidents arising from human error during plant operations, and reporting medical incidents, such as incidents that arise when monitoring the aged or impaired in performing the activities of daily living.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Autonomous Reasoning/Artificial Intelligence Database Development and Interfacing Human-Computer Interfaces