Apache™ OODT (Object-Oriented Data Technology) is being used to support multiple science data systems at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In the scientific data systems domain, one of the critical functions that data systems must provide is to enable users to efficiently discover, find, access, and readily utilize useful science content from NASA’s increasingly large volumes of multi-mission, multi-instrument science data heterogeneously distributed among NASA’s data sources at various geographic locations.

In the past, when users want to analyze or retrieve these science data, they had to leverage various custom-built tools. Using OODT that provides transparent access to distributed resources, functionality for data discovery and query optimization, as well as distributed processing and virtual archives; JPL data systems can handle data from various sources in a uniform way.

In this talk, we will describe our experience over the past several years in leveraging and deploying OODT in our science data systems. We will outline the software engineering challenges that we faced, addressed, and along the way using OODT. We will describe several large-scale deployments of OODT, and the manner in which OODT helped us to address the data discovery and access challenges. We will also relate the lessons we have learned drawing from our experience.