SpaceFlight

A modelling exercise in attempting to capture data about space flights in RDF.

The idea being to capture the human readable data on pages like this one from NASA in RDF in order to achieve a number of goals:

• Explore modelling of real world data as RDF
• Expose the data in a structured format to facilitiate reuse and more existing presentations, e.g. for educational purposes
• To support archiving of material
• To explore possibilities of annotating the associated images and media with additional metadata
• To link this into the Linked Open Data cloud, e.g. via movies, actors playing astronauts, etc.

The basic modelling is relatively straightforward with classes for Spacecraft, Mission, FlightSeries, etc. These are linked together with additional properties, e.g to associate a Mission with a specific Fliugh Series.

Impacts are also modelled as separate classes. Impacts have co-ordinates. But we can't reuse existing geo vocabularies here because of the different co-ordinate systems. Co-ordinates on the moon use a Selenographic system. And, as shown here the published co-ordinates may change over time after different analyses.

TODO add permanent link to ontologies and data. There's a draft on pastebin along with some instance data.

Also explore linking schemas to the SWEET ontologies and defining equivalence with DBpedia terms.

An RDF/XML version is http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Vocab/space.rdf, diagrammed as http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Vocab/view.xq?rdf=http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/Vocab/space.rdf