Although the space station will be the initial testbed for SHIP, developers hope it can also monitor the health of other space vehicles, including the crew exploration vehicle, the proposed replacement for the space shuttle, Alena added.

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Massachusetts, said that organizations building service-oriented architectures that need Web services accessing real-time data often turn to EII tools rather than build data warehouses to address data-integration problems.

With EII tools, companies can leave data in source systems instead of using extract, transform and load tools to send summary views of data that might not be up to date in warehouses, he added.

"If you leave stuff in the original data sources, it is always current," Bloomberg said. "In NASA's case, they need to make sure they get real-time, complete data."