We are in the process of developing an ontology for astronomy that uses as a starting point the Thesaurus of astronomical terms recently developed by the semantics working group of the International Virtual Observatory Association (IVOA). The SKOS version of this thesaurus is here. We have converted the SKOS to OWL (changing instances of concepts to classes), split it into smaller ontologies, and are in the process of adding properties to these classes. Since astronomy is a fairly interdisciplinary applied science, the ontology naturally breaks up into several branches of science and engineering: physics, chemistry, math, statistics, instrumentation, etc.
One can do an SVN checkout of the OWL files using the repository name http://archive.astro.umd.edu/astro-onto. Then one can run differences to see how it has evolved from the original SKOS version.
This work is undertaken for the project "Automated Data
Analysis with Knowledge
Ontologies", funded by NASA/Applied Information and Space
Research Program. The project seeks to create a Graphical User
Interface, OWLVIPER for expressing Ontological Classes with arbitrary
Restrictions on property objects and data. It allows graphical
expression of a pipeline process of data on scientific objects from
search of distributed archives through operations and
transformations to a goal or initial query. The Ontology is
utilized by a Work Flow Manger that aids the user by providing possible
avenues of transformation that could reach the goal.