MetaSat

MetaSat is open metadata that links the hardware, software, data, and people behind small satellite missions. Every concept in the vocabulary has its own permanent identifier, so satellite research objects can be described consistently, found, and reused. It is implementable in JSON-LD and RDF, and ships with crosswalks that map its concepts onto other metadata standards and databases.

MetaSat was one of two project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that I led as principal investigator at the John G. Wolbach Library of the Center for Astrophysics.

The MetaSat vocabulary itself was developed and curated by Daniel Chivvis, Wolbach’s Metadata Research Fellow, in close collaboration with the Libre Space Foundation. SatNOGS, the global open source satellite ground station network, was the first project to implement MetaSat in its APIs, and the vocabulary has since been referenced by other satellite metadata efforts. The full vocabulary, example files, and metadata guide remain available at schema.space.

My projects MetaSat and LSTN were built to reinforce each other. MetaSat gave satellite missions a shared language for describing their work, and LSTN put both that language and real ground stations into the hands of public library communities.