boundaries

[Tony Linde]

Hi Rob,
 
I was not trying to throttle the discussion but asking if this was the best
place for it. As you say, this group has only recently revived. In that
revival, there's been claims from other groups that 'semantics' really
belongs to them: the ucd and dm groups have made that claim and registry and
voql could also claim the space. I want to ensure that this group does
continue because I believe it has a useful purpose in stimulating just such
discussions and more besides and that there is a need for an interest group
where conceptual discussions can reside. But we need to be able to recognise
when it is time for a discussion to be handed off to an existing specialist
workgroup.
 
So, what I was asking for were guidelines that could go into the charter
that recognise that boundaries do exist, that they will be fuzzy but that
when it is obvious that they've been crossed, we hand over to existing
workgroups or recommend that a new one be created.
 
There may be several ways that the boundary might be crossed, eg:
 
1. the sem.ig gets onto discussing how a voevent and its structure might be
accomodated within the overall AstroOntology; this discussion ends up
discussing what a voevent is and how it is distinguished from non-voevents;
we hand over to the voevent.wg for a resolution; when they've discussed and
defined the distinction we incorporate it into the conceptual ontology.
 
2. the voevent group discusses how their data model might be represented;
they create schemas and models and want to incorporate that into the
AstroOntology; they hand over what they've done to this group; we add the
voevent concepts to the overall ontology in a way that suits the way
voevents might be used and discuss ways in which this ontology might be used
by existing apps that handle voevents and by existing semantic apps that
currently do not.
 
I don't pretend that I fully (or even partially) understand the voevent
discussions taking part here and if they are mainly conceptual rather than
practical and are only about ontological distinctions then I'm happy for it
to continue. But I'd like an assurance from Roy that this is the case and
that the discussions are not better sited in his list (which is where I
assume all the voevent experts are hanging out).
 
Cheers,
Tony.


  _____  

From: owner-semantics at eso.org [mailto:owner-semantics at eso.org] On Behalf Of
Rob Seaman
Sent: 05 June 2005 07:44
To: semantics at ivoa.net
Cc: Rob Seaman
Subject: Re: boundaries



What do others think about the boundary between this group and the
workgroups? And what is the best way to capture that boundary in the charter
of the group?



The semantics forum has existed since September 2002 (and I for one have
been receiving it since the beginning). Prior to 4 days ago, there had been
91 messages in 31 months. 79 of those messages came in the first month and a
half of the list's existence. Over the next two and a half years, there were
a grand total of a dozen messages. There have been about three dozen
messages in the last few days. Is it truly necessary, or desirable, to
throttle back the first interesting discussion that comes along? Note that
the mailing list has a threaded archive
(http://www.ivoa.net/forum/semantics) for those who would prefer to skip
entire topics.

That said, the best way to muffle a discussion you don't want to have is to
start an alternate discussion about something that interests you more.

Rob Seaman
NOAO

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