Skip to main content

Methods & Data Coverage

How we process, validate and present space biology evidence

DATA FOUNDATION

  • 572 peer-reviewed publications from NASA spaceflight studies aggregated from OSDR, PSI, GeneLab, Task Book, and PubMed Central
  • 245 OSDR dataset cross-references linking publications to related experimental data
  • 156 GeneLab datasets with genomic and transcriptomic profiles
  • 87 Task Book entries linked to related research activity
  • Full-text XML articles parsed from open repositories where available

EVIDENCE PROCESSING PIPELINE

  • Section-level parsing using IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion)
  • 2,165 section-level evidence spans extracted and tagged by section type
  • Section-aware retrieval where Results sections are prioritised for factual claims
  • Semantic embeddings generated for evidence spans to support similarity search
  • Structured claim extraction from scientific text
  • Discussion-section mining to identify explicit research gaps

KNOWLEDGE GRAPH CONSTRUCTION

  • 1,092 structured claims extracted from the corpus
  • 28,864 evidence relations mapped across the literature
  • Support and contradiction links used to surface consensus and contested findings
  • Graph views help users explore relationships across topics, organisms, and mission contexts

AUTOMATED GAP IDENTIFICATION

  • 173 research gaps identified from Discussion sections and corpus coverage analysis
  • Gaps classified by topic and organism type
  • Priority and severity signals used to highlight mission-relevant unknowns
  • Mission-specific views surface gaps relevant to Lunar, Mars, and ISS scenarios

QUALITY ASSURANCE & VALIDATION

  • Section classification manually validated on a sample set
  • Claim extraction reviewed with biology SME input
  • Gap outputs spot-checked against known NASA literature patterns
  • Traceable citations link findings back to source publications
  • Confidence scoring combines study count, section quality, recency, and source signals

MISSION APPLICATIONS

  • Mission-specific filtering supports evidence retrieval for Lunar, Mars, and ISS scenarios
  • Risk assessment support by surfacing known hazards, evidence gaps, and contradictions
  • Countermeasure evaluation through evidence synthesis across multiple studies
  • Topic views support exploration of bone, immune, radiation, muscle, and cardiovascular effects

Open Science

This project follows open science principles. The methodology is documented, and future work includes expanding the corpus, improving reproducibility, and releasing more of the processing workflow.