A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

Help us put scientific papers on the map—of Mars!

Here at NASA Ames, we're working with Google, Inc., and the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System to get scientific papers geo-located on Mars. Although we'll start with explicitly geo-locating a few, we want to enable a system so that the scientific community itself can add geo-location information to already-published works, and encourage future publications to include easier to parse geo-location information.

We need an intern to help us with the following:

• create an initial seed of test data
• develop the supervised parsing strategies for extracting geospatial data from scientific plain text
• develop the information architecture for doing all of this
• create the presentation of the geographic data for Google Mars 3D

You will need:

• Some aptitude for reading scientific papers about Mars (understanding them isn't required, just a general reading to understand the places that they're talking about and how those can be translated into coordinates).
• Experience with the Python programming language.
• Some group software development experience.
• Appreciation of database concepts (you aren't going to be implementing one, but you'll be indirectly working with one).
• Experience with KML.

If you are interested in applying for this position, please send the following via e-mail:

1. a cover letter
2. a detailed resume (PDF or text)

to Dr. Ross.A.Beyer@nasa.gov

The Planetary Content Team at NASA's Ames Research Center develops software that makes it easier for scientists and engineers to publish and access Earth and planetary imagery and data via the Internet. This includes both educational/outreach content aimed at the general public as well as technical data aimed at the scientific community. Headquartered in the Intelligent Systems Division at Ames, the team also includes partners in other areas of the agency and elsewhere.