Where to start (was: Ontology for Dummies)

[Roy Williams]

Tony et al

What I am looking for from this discussion is a project that brings
together astronomical data and  what I will call Knowledge Engineering.
Something where a 6-month effort by one person leads to a demo where the
viewer would be a bit impressed at what the Virtual Observatory can do,
(even if that person is still an astronomer in the Fortran club!)

It may be that the topics under management are:

(1) Physical objects, such as galaxies. Of course NED and Simbad already
do a good job there, and they have been doing that for years. Is there a
capability that can be added to NED?

(2) Data types a la UCD. "Find me services that consume Orbital
Eccentricity and also a Light Curve". "Given a table that has Johnson
Photometry, can this be converted to Gunn Photometry?"

(3) Services and Published Data -- a VO registry. Yellow pages and
classifications of data providers and their data, but without employing
a full-time librarian. How can someone publish their own data/services
into this system?

How can we see something good from Knowledge Engineering without
investing many years and millions of currency units?

Roy

---------
Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
mail    roy at cacr.caltech.edu
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