The keynote speaker for the final day of the Data Harmony Users Group (DHUG) 2021 annual gathering was Dr. Moriba Jah, Astrodynamicist, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin and holder of the Mrs. Pearlie Dashiell Henderson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering.
This is Dr. Jah’s second time speaking to DHUG in five years about space garbage. Most people don’t think too much about garbage in space. Out of sight, out of mind. However, when a space object stops working, it drifts aimlessly into the cosmos. Rogue bits of metal and space debris pose a danger to the technologies we rely on and to the future of space exploration.
“There is some chaos driven by randomness,” shared Dr. Jah. “But there is also structure due to the complexity.”
Dr. Jah updated the DHUG audience with information about Astriagraph – the knowledge graph he was just starting in 2016. The approach he took was an ontology-based knowledge graph, leveraging a resource description framework (RDF). The power in organizing information in this semantically connected fashion is that it enables linking disparate sources of information, creating vast trees of descriptions of many different elements, thus encouraging findability and discovery from data linking.
Dr. Jah reminded us that there is data everywhere. However, “there is zero information until we ask a question.”
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
