chronos

Xploration is an app aimed to fulfill the space enthusiasts' eagerness for a thorough understanding of space missions by visualizing, on a single mobile app, data otherwise spread all over the web, in order to understand the past, the present and (get a glimpse of ) the future of space exploration, as seen by the different space (international) agencies. Furthermore, Xploration will allow users to get a rough idea of what designing a real space mission entails. The app will guide them, throughout a simplified design workflow, towards the sketching a plausible mission, pointing out mistakes and suggesting why the settings should be modified. The team integrates Computer Programming skills with Aerospace know-how, in order to be effective on two levels: conceptual (i.e. user experience) and technical (i.e. server/client interface). With this competences we can provide also a REST service by which every developer can access the apps' information openly and make her/his creativity to join with the passion for space.

Xploration is shaped around:

• spacecrafts' (Cubesats and COTS) real navigation and scientific equipment described in terms of relationships and trade-offs among systems and subsystems through qualitative modeling. Every assembling pieces of the spacecraft is going to be described through mark-up language, making users to play with layouts and to problem-solve engineering tasks to launch the mission

• a knowledge base: a data definition framework to index scientific and engineering articles and papers and classify them, based on agencies' defined subjects. This feature is going to provide the application with a galaxy of knowledge, well ordered and indexed to be usable by players during their learning experience*

• the interactive interface that is going to integrate this features into an innovative, artistic, datamatic experience, where visuals, data and sounds play together with user while designing, assembling and managing a realistic space mission.

The IT architecture is going to be compliant with Linked Data, W3C's standard for Semantic Web. We are working directly on data and documents supplied by Space Agencies and Linked Open Data (NASA-STI program) that let us connect with existing knowledge bases like DBpedia or FreeBase.

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