Research Data Infrastructure & Visualization
Engineering capability for funded research data work: ingest and catalog infrastructure, processing pipelines, and visualization for scientific datasets. Available as a subaward partner or subcontractor.
Research Data Infrastructure & Visualization
Engineering capability for funded research data work: ingest and catalog infrastructure, processing pipelines, and visualization for scientific datasets. Available as a subaward partner or subcontractor.
Hekuva is an engineering practice for research data: the infrastructure that carries scientific data from instrument to archive, and the interfaces that make it legible once it is there. The work is delivered as labour — a subaward on a proposal, or a subcontract to a prime — rather than as a product to license.
It is run by Aaron Caldwell, a software engineer with 15+ years in the spatial and geospatial space and 6+ years supporting NOAA's geospatial infrastructure across two federal engagements. Hekuva can be named as a subaward partner on a federal proposal; HEKUVA LLC is registered and active in SAM.gov.
Cloud-native systems for large scientific datasets: ingest paths, catalogs, query layers and storage formats that still hold up as a collection grows. Built on open standards — STAC, COG, Zarr, PostGIS — rather than a stack you would have to buy into.
Interactive views over large datasets, built for the researchers and analysts who already know the data rather than as a simplified front end. Web mapping, time series and exploratory interfaces, delivered as production software.
Two federal engagements, 2014–2018 and 2023–present: 6+ years supporting NOAA's geospatial infrastructure, with a working knowledge of operational requirements, review cycles and the security posture federal data work assumes.
A structured discovery programme with scientists, data managers and program staff across federal and academic settings, on where research data obligations break down in practice. Written up, and now informing proposal work.
Turning those recurring failure modes into a precise account of when a dataset can be called complete and correct — including the false-pass case, where a record is present, complete and checksum-clean while being wrong for the system that was actually deployed.
Founder & Principal Engineer
Aaron has spent 15+ years building spatial and geospatial systems, alternating between federal Earth science and commercial product engineering. He worked federal Earth science data from 2014 to 2018, spent the interval as Senior GIS Engineer at Elastic shipping commercial geospatial product, and returned to federal data work in 2023. The combination is the point: how an agency's data programs actually operate, and how to ship software to a deadline. That pairing is usually the gap a research group has when it wins federal infrastructure money.
Building a proposal that needs research data infrastructure or visualization work? Hekuva can join as a subaward partner or a subcontractor.
one@hekuva.com