README.md

RDF Ontologies for Astronomical Data and Workflows

This repository contains two RDF ontologies that include astronomical concepts and workflows. Slightly different versions of these ontologies are used in a MMODA workflow, analyse-short-astro-text. Both should be part of the main ODA ontology

Ontologies

1. Astro-Facilities Ontology:
   This ontology focuses on concepts such as: telescopes, observatories, surveys, and space telescopes.

2. MMODA-Workflows Ontology:
   This ontology captures the MMODA workflows (publicaly available on the 25th of November 2024) and their relationship to the instruments captured in the previous ontology.

Standards and Resources

The ontologies build upon widely-used vocabularies and ontologies in the semantic web and astronomical domains, ensuring alignment with existing standards:

• Dublin Core Terms
• OWL Web Ontology Language
• RDF Schema (RDFS)
• SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System)
• IVOA Messenger Ontology
• IVOA UAT Ontology
• ODA Ontology

New Classes and Properties

The ontologies introduce four new classes and one object property to enhance the existing semantic structure:

New Classes:

1. misctelescope
   A class for entities that are not obviously described by the other categories (8 entities).

2. telescope-class
   A class defining different categories of telescopes based on their characteristics and functionalities, e.g. Corrected Dall Kikham (CDK) or Schmidt telescopes (10 entities).

3. institution
   Represents organizations or institutions that manage or operate astronomical facilities (11 entities).

4. observatory
   A concept related to the observatories concept. In practice, for simplicity, all entities that include in their name the word "Observatory" are classified as observatory (129 entities).

New Object Property:

• canDetect
  Relates an entity (e.g., a telescope or survey) to the type of messengers it can detect, as defined in the IVOA Messenger Ontology and IVOA UAT Ontology for the gravitational waves.

Other classes:

1. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#telescopes (292 entities)
2. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#surveys (85 entities)
3. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#space-telescopes (123 entities)
4. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#refracting-telescopes (17 entities)
5. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#radio-telescopes (60 entities)
6. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#radio-interferometry (1 entity)
7. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#neutrino-telescopes (3 entities)
8. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/uat#astronomical-instrumentation (46 entities)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you have suggestions for improvements or extensions, please open an issue or submit a pull request.