Alternative proposal

[John Taylor]

On 10 May 2007, at 23:44, Robert Hanisch wrote:


>
> Anita, you also suggested that astronomers will search for data by  
> UCD.  I
> do not believe it.  If I showed an astronomer down the hall the UCD
> dictionary and said use these terms to look for data, they would  
> toss me out
> of the office at superluminal speeds.  Hell, _I_ am not going to  
> use UCDs as
> search criteria, and I pretty much understand them.  UCDs are for  
> programs
> to figure out what quantities might be comparable.

Is it not possible that they could be used "under the hood"?  The  
astronomer types in his search terms in natural language, and a smart  
registry client can then guess at suitable UCDs or utypes to use in  
the search?  There could also be specialised tools that require  
registry resources with certain UCDs - the user wouldn't necessarily  
be aware of this, but the tool would be filtering the search results  
by UCD.

John