Mappin: A Web Native Browse Tool for the NASA JPL ITS_LIVE Project’s Ice Velocity Dataset
Jacob R. Fahnestock, Douglas E. Dow · 2023
The ITS_LIVE Project has created a vast and detailed ice velocity dataset and made it publicly available through the cloud. The ITS_LIVE team of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory built a Jupyter Notebook based browse tool to make the data more accessible to non-technical users, but it required a large amount of complex server computation per user, making scaling and maintenance of the web application difficult. The purpose of this project was to develop Mappin, a client-side browser for this ice velocity dataset. Mappin improved scalability over the ITS_LIVE Browse Tool by shifting the compute off an intermediary data server and on to the client device. As a static site, Mappin can utilize Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for distribution improving initial load times. Mappin also utilized stateful URLs enabling users to collaborate and share their findings. Mappin’s performance and accessibility improvements were successfully demonstrated with load testing and audit tools.