The MECA Project: Using An OWL/RDF Knowledge Base To Ensure Data Portability For Human Space Mission Operations. http://www.crewassistant.com/papers. asp?InfoId=71

The Mission Execution Crew Assistant (MECA) project is an ESA research project that aims to boost the cognitive capacities of human-machine teams during planetary exploration missions in order to allow them to cope autonomously with unexpected, complex and potentially hazardous situations. To achieve a high level of autonomy, the MECA software must have a semantically rich view of the world in which it operates. It must have an understanding of high level mission objects (such as goals, re-sources, actors, tasks, procedures, plans and schedules) but also of lower-level system information (such as vehicles, payloads, instruments, sensors, actuators, processors, telemetry, test results, and fault diag-noses). In order to assist the human astronaut optimally, MECA must also be aware of human issues such as trust, task load, stress levels, and other cognitive aspects of human-computer interfacing. Following the general objective of human-machine partnership, a major part of the information should be easily shared (i.e. understood) by both human and machine actors. For the MECA-2007 Proof of Concept demonstrator, the MECA team used a distributed RDF knowledge base, containing heterogeneous data described by various OWL ontologies. The common semantic worldview provided by the RDF data made it possible and even easy for the software to be aware of and reason about connections between concepts and data that are not normally considered interoperable. It was also instrumental in implementing parts of MECA as semantic web services, facilitating the sharing of knowledge among heterogeneous agents. 1