Rwp02-Suggestions for Registry Requirements

[Kirk Borne]

Hello Chenzhou.  Those are very good questions.

Regarding the international language support, I will defer
to my more experienced colleagues working in that area,
though I believe that each nation's V.O. project should
devote some attention to their specific needs in such
translations of queries and results.  I think that something
like a set of language-sensitive UCDs might help.

Regarding your question about an "expert knowledge registry",
again I think that UCDs can help.  In your particular example,
what is important is that the registry knows that "galaxy"
is a class of objects, that "deVaucouleours profile" is
a derived parameter (in this case, a derived parameter from
a set of derived parameters = the light profile), and that
"elliptical galaxy" is one particular subclass from a more
general class of objects.  The registry should be able
to report (back to the user's client or to some VO client)
that "Yes/No, this site has (or does not have) information 
about objects, or about classications of objects, or
about derived parameters from objects, or we have the
analysis tools and data to derive those parameters, ..."

I don't expect that our astronomical information service
registries will include every possible term and concept
in astronomy, but the VO-query (VOQL) should be able
to parse such requests and identify the type of request
(request for data, metadata, analysis service), and then
use that to poll the registries for positive responses.

- Kirk
+------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Dr. Kirk D. Borne                  | mailto:Kirk.Borne at gsfc.nasa.gov     |
| Institute for Science & Technology, Raytheon (IST at R)                     |
| NASA Goddard Space Flight Center   |                                     |
| Astrophysics Data Facility         | Phone: 301-286-0696                 |
| Code 631                           |     or 301-286-2772:Kathy Starling  |
| Greenbelt, MD  20771               | FAX:   301-286-1771                 |
+------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
  US Virtual Observatory:  http://us-vo.org/
  Staff page:     http://rings.gsfc.nasa.gov/~borne/bio_borne_kirk.html


> Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 09:34:38 +0800
> From: Cui Chenzhou <ccz at bao.ac.cn>
> To: registry at ivoa.net
> Subject: Rwp02-Suggestions for Registry Requirements
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I think two problems should be addressed in the VO Registry:
> 
> 1. Expert knowledge registry
> 
> Given an question, for example, "Find all galaxies with a deVaucouleours
> profile and the photometric colors consistent with an elliptical galaxy"
>  (taken from Question 5, Alexander S. Szalay 2000, Designing and Mining
> Multi-Terabyte Astronomy Archives:The Sloan Digital Sky Survey),
> application service needs know "what is a galaxy", "what is a
> deVaucouleours profile", "what is an elliptical galaxy". Should, how and
> where these expert knowledge be registered?
> 
> 2. International language support
> 
> Can VO permit users to submit queries in Chinese or Russian? How these
> queries are transformed and executed taking advantage of VO Registry?
> 
> All kinds of comments and suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> -- 
> ============================================================
> Chenzhou Cui  (Ph.D. Candidate, LAMOST project)
> National Astronomical Observatory | Tel: (8610)64877703-1320
> Chinese Academy of Sciences       | FAX: (8610)64878240
> Datun Road 20A, Chaoyang District | Email: ccz at bao.ac.cn
> Beijing 100012, China             | WWW: www.lamost.org/~cb
> ============================================================