Namespace for Space Design

Introduction

What is Namespace?

A namespace is a set of symbols that are used to organize objects of various kinds, so that these objects may be referred to by name. Namespaces are commonly structured as hierarchies to allow reuse of names in different contexts. [1]

Why Namespace?

The mechanism of XLP system is a Digital Publishing Workflow, namely the output is a certain kind of digital publication. Each publication, whether digital or printed material, during its conception stages, must manage its glossary or namespace.

Consensus Mechanism

Namespace provides a complete structure for concept sets, namely a well-defined context for everyone to refer to. In this way consensus of a community can be reached by such commonality in pragmatics, which forms the basis of any group learning process.

For Space System Design

XLP believes that all design or creating process are based on analogies, and all analogies are mappings (or functions in Category Theory mentioned below) which can be regarded as symbolic systems adding searchable labels to the information. [2]

Specifically, the designing of space transportation systems requires very complex path calculations and orbital optimization of gravitational fields which needs a multi-scale knowledge management system, which is a symbolic computing system to record the permutational and combinatorial possibilities of system designs. In this sense, all design process is management of the symbolic system, id est namespace management.

Namespace Using MediaWiki

Being a mature paradigm, space system design does have a namespace that usually appears in the form of glossarys or standardlized design parameters in related textbooks or manuals. Then why we are to rebuild namespace using Wiki in this course? It is owed to Wiki's unique features[3]:

• Incremental

Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet.

• Organic

"The structure and text content of the site are open to editing and evolution." Hence it is convenient for iterative improvement. and cross-checking by collaborators.

• Universal

The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of writing, so that any writer is automatically an editor and organizer. It is consistent to the concept of self-governence in learning communities and contributes to its operation.

In essence, Wiki is by far the best suitable collaborative knowledge management container (also a key concept for XLP, see Containerized Digital Assets) for communities to increment and optimize their knowledge. Besides the content data, the behavioral data (e.g. edit records) are also tokenized and collected in form of time stamp sequence in Wiki logs. Hence compared to appendices in traditional static publication, namespaces constructed by bunch of linked Wiki entries are live documents which every single participant could benefit both him/herself and others by simply contributing to it, and a dynamic document can always be updated by adaptation to evloving context and situations! Furthermore, since individual/collective performance are quantified and credited by transparent behavioral logs, it is possible for all particpants to analyze data in standardlized tools and methods like Matomo and Elasticsearch as feedbacks, which completes the cycle of digital learning process.

Category Theory

Category Theory in A Nutshell

Category theory formalizes mathematical structure and its concepts in terms of a labeled directed graph called a category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called morphisms[4]. Informally, category theory is an universal symbolic system describing structures and comparisons among them. It was originally developed by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lanefrom the concept of functions which compare objects in Abstract Algebra and then extended to functors comparing categories and natural transformations comparing functors . These concepts endow cognitive foundation of XLP with abstract description in mathematical exactness.

Category Theory in Namespace and MediaWiki

Mentioning Category Theory in this introduction makes sense, because it gives a precise description of namespace structure. In a typical Wiki, entries are categorized in different namespaces to avoid identifier conflicts and entries in a specific namespace also fall into various categories. The concept of "category" here shares most of its characters with "category" in Category Theory, though slight differences do exist (note that it is also an example of namespace issue!).

As noted above, there're 3 types of morphisms in Category Theory: function, functor and natural transformation. In Wiki, entries are instances of objects, functions are links between these entries, and the relations between categories (e.g outlinks in "See Also" section) can be regarded as instances of functors.

Namespace Demo in MediaWiki

The demo below shows how to build namespace for Space System Design using MediaWiki.

Start building your ontology right now!

Namespace in Wiki Format

Here is a table to illustrate the structure of some entries shown in SMAD index above.

Note that a category can have its subcategories and sub-subcategories and more, plus contents in a certain entry can be linked to other entries in different categories for sure! In fact all of the pages can relate, whatever the category!

Currently we use lorem ipsum instead of real content in entries--these entries will be defined by you!

Index
Subcategory	Subcategory/Entry	Entry
Constellation	Active Debris Avoidance
Coverage
Orbits	Escape Velocity
	Low Earth Orbit	Ground Track Plot
		Sample Thermal Calculation
		Ground Station Coverage
Space Environments	Microgravity
	Plasmas

Summary

In short, the key concept is to manage the namespace through the standardization of wiki entries, and then establish data collection for dynamic changes of content referring to the time consensus mechanism of the network system, and tie these data to behavior codes for learning community.

References

[1] Wertz, J. R., & Larson, W. J. (1999). Space mission analysis and design. Hawthorne, CA: Microcosm.