2026 July ESIP Meeting

Metadata curation deals with many processes that can be substantially accelerated through AI, including selecting relevant terms from large controlled vocabularies, drafting descriptions, and extracting basic information from resources being described. This session brings together challenges, works in progress, and successes from several NASA sciences on incorporating AI techniques into curation workflows. We feature presentations from all five NASA science areas — Heliophysics, Astrophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Biological and Physical Sciences — balanced with discussion for attendees to learn from others' work and collaboratively incorporate that progress into their own curation workflows for data, software, and other science resources.

Session Chairs
(Heliophysics) Rebecca Ringuette, Lead
(Astrophysics) Vandana Desai
(Astrophysics) Susan Mullally
(Earth Science) Elisabeth Huffer
(Planetary Science) Lynn Neakrase
(Biological and Physical Sciences) Walter Alvarado
(ESIP Semantic Technologies WG Lead) Cogan Shimizu

Session Presenters
Kelly Lockhart: Extracting Data and Software Citations in SciX: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
John Wu: Assessing mission impact through automated AI-powered bibliometrics
Nick Susemiehl: AI-Accelerated Literature Data Extraction and other AI Projects at IPAC
David Nilsen: Extracting metadata from Data Files using AI
Lynn Neakrase: NASA Planetary Data System: AI for Data Curation
Walter Alvarado: Applying AI methods to Accelerate Curation in Space Biology
Shawn Polson: Building AI Agents for Heliophysics Software Metadata Extraction and Validation 
Amanda Butler: Leveraging KG and MCP servers for space life sciences data analysis

Audience
ESIP Semantic Technologies Committee members; ESIP Data Stewardship and Machine Learning Cluster members; curators and data stewards in any science looking for new methods; repository managers seeking to streamline metadata workflows