Apollo 11 Moon LOnDing

The first step in the process of organising knowledge related to the Apollo 11 moon landing was to create a conceptual map in order to visualise our items. We placed the main concept of our domain, the Apollo 11 moon landing itself, at the centre of our diagram, with our objects surrounding it.

We then connected the items from our collection to the Apollo 11 moon landing and to the real metadata extracted from the objects’ cultural organisations’ records, to produce a schematic representation of the domain we’d be working with for this project and to highlight the most important concepts and people in it.

The conceptual map below, and all maps for this project, conform to the following key.

We then converted our conceptual map into an entity-relationship model by abstracting from particulars to more general, universal concepts.

For example: the authors/creators of our items were converted into the generic class ‘person’; the specific dates of creation of our items were converted into the generic class ‘date’; the museums and cultural centres that house our items were converted into the generic class ‘institution’; our items themselves were converted into generic classes, such as ‘book’, ‘physical artefact’, ‘recording’, etc.

In order to progress our organisation of knowledge related to the Apollo 11 moon landing, we identified the metadata standards employed by the provider institution of each of our objects.

In some cases we were not able to directly access or retrieve the metadata standards, such as in the cases of the National Air and Space Museum and Worldcat.

After contacting the National Air and Space Museum, we discovered that it uses a software system called ‘The Museum System’ for cataloguing its physical artefacts. Unfortunately, we were unable to access this software. As a substitute, we identified CIDOC-CRM as an appropriate metadata standard for the museal context.

In the case of Worldcat, since the website is an aggregator of library content and, consequently, doesn't provide an unique standard to describe its items, we chose the first edition of our book "We never went on the moon" and decided to adopt Marc21, which supplements the MODS standard used by other bibliographic items in our collection.

The metadata standards that we chose to align are therefore:

1. Dublin Core: composed of fifteen main elements for describing resources, we employed this standard as a reference for all the others, due to its generality
2. MMD XML schema: an XML based document format to represent music metadata, easy to read, powerful and extensible
3. DACS (Description Archives: A Content Standard): an output-neutral set of rules for describing archives, personal papers, and manuscript collections, which can be applied to all material types
4. EAD (Encoded Archival Description): an XML standard used for encoding archival finding aids, which mixes the archival workflow with the need for electronic document processing
5. Marc21: a carrier for bibliographic information about printed and manuscript textual materials, computer files, maps, music, continuing resources, visual materials, and mixed materials
6. MODS: schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications
7. CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model): an extensible ontology to create a reference model, employed by museums and other cultural institutions to describe their collections
8. Schema.org: launched by Yahoo, Bing and Google, an initiative which strives to provide its users with a framework via which to use structured data mark-up for web pages
9. LCDRG (Lifecycle Data Requirements Guide): outlines the metadata standards used by the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) for the permanent description of archival materials

After having identified, chosen, and analysed the metadata standards for our objects, we carried out a process of metadata alignment. To do this, we categorised the informal, natural language predicates from our conceptual map and ER model into: who, what, where, and when. We then identified the most appropriate label for each of these predicates from the aforementioned metadata standards.

With all the information acquired in the previous steps, we were able to analyse the Apollo 11 moon landing and the items in our collection from a different perspective.

Our primary objective in this step was twofold: firstly, to enhance the relationships between our objects and, secondly, to enhance our representation of the three narrative threads we had previously outlined as the focus of our knowledge organisation process (namely, impact on popular culture, political background, doubts and conspiracies).Hence we were able to enrich the design of our scenario, adding more concepts and events to better explicit the narratives we focused on and create new relationships between items, people, places, dates of the Apollo 11 moon landing according to them.

New relationships and interlinkages included:

• Expanding our description of the people involved with the items chosen, through the inclusion of dates and place of birth and death, nationality and roles. Moreover, explicit the relationships among the people involved in the Apollo 11 mission.
• Adding fundamental concepts: ‘Moon landing conspiracy theories’ and the idea of ‘Landing man on the moon’ in order to connect between each other the entities already present in our items description and higlight their role in our narrative lines.
• Enhancing the description of our events by adding temporal and spatial notions, actors and organizers, and semantic relations of casuality and inclusivity with other events.
• Enhancing our representation of the ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ book by including the fact that it is based on a work that had two expressions: the book version, as already included, but also a film version, the screenplay of which was written by Stanley Kubrick, who also contributed to the writing of the book version. It should be noted that, due to the impressive realism and technical modernity of the movie Staley Kubrick was also alledged to have directed the famous footage of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
• Including the link between Arthur C. Clarke, author of the ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ book, and the ‘First on the Moon’ book, for which Clarke wrote the epilogue. This addition, along with the previous one, was particularly meaningful to us, since it allowed to explicit the relation of our item to the conspiracy theories concept and, to the cultural backroung surrounding our main event, that was indeed timechanging in the fact that it somehow blurred the lines between science-fiction and reality.
• Adding ‘the Space Race’ and ‘the Soviet Union’. This allowed us to connect Kennedy's ‘Special Message to Congress’ speech and consequently to the ideological cause ‘Landing man on the moon’ mentioned in it. These new relationships enabled us to emphasise the political background of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

This theoretical model allowed us to enhance the previous version of our ER model, shown below.

Through the employment of the most appropriate ontologies, schemas and vocabularies, our ER model was then transformed into a conceptual one.

This allowed us to advance the formalisation of our project and to better convey the entities and properties used for each object.

The main ontologies used for this step were:

1. CIDOC-CRM: one of the most frequent ontologies in the model, both due to the fact that it is the best choice when it comes to describing museum objects - and many of our items indeed belong to this category - and because it is useful for harmonising information from different domains.
2. OAD: a specific ontology for archival description,its classes and properties were created to represent the archival resources as linked data. We used it to formalize our two speech items as oad:ArchivalResource.
3. FRBR: an IFLA standard that proposes the creation of bibliographic concepts according to the WEMI model, (Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item) schema, which was extremely useful to identify the relationships between the book “A Space Odyssey” and its movie adaptation, through the concept of “work” (frbr-.Work) and “expression” (frbr:Expression).
4. FABIO: a FRBR-aligned ontology, especially designed for the bibliographic domain, that integrates new entities of published or potentially publishable material, as well as new properties to extend the FRBR data model. Designed to have greater flexibility and interoperability, it facilitates the descriptions and connections of bibliographic items in our collection.
5. DC: used for more general entities and properties. For example, creators or the subject of an event.
6. FOAF: was employed to describe real life people (e.g.: Neil Armstrong) and the relationships between people.
7. PRO: was adopted to describe characterisation of the roles of agents in our scenario.
8. Schema: applied to all items which did not necessarily belong in the LAM domain (for example, the TV episode, “Waterloo”), thanks to its flexibility and large number of properties and entities. It was also adopted to describe persons that belongs to our scenario more as actors of events rather then as persons related to the creation and description of items.
9. The Music Ontology: used to describe the song, “Man on the Moon”, since it provides a model for publishing structured music-related data.
10. BIBFRAME: is employed to describe bibliographic records on the web, using Linked Data techniques. This framework aims to be a transition for MARC 21, still supporting the robust data exchange which happened in the previous years.
11. The Event Ontology: was extremely useful to further develop the concept “event”, inside our conceptual model through cognitive agents that classify relationships between events. It also follows a similar design and layout employed also by the Music Ontology and FOAF, two other ontologies used in this project.
12. Time ontology: was adopted to describe temporal concepts related to our events.
13. SKOS: the Simple Knowledge Organization System, was adopted to formalize our concepts description and relations.
14. Dbpedia Ontology: was employed in particular to describe our “Apollo 11 space mission” event, since it provided us with the specific class "dbo:SpaceMission" and related predicates. I was also used used to formalize predicates such as ‘named after’ and ‘genre’.

Inside of the project, XSD has also been used to further explain the data types used.