Ontology assessment?

[Ed Shaya]

Tony,
	I can speak to our efforts here at U. of Maryland.  The work is being 
done on a specific proposal from NASA/AISRP to create an application 
that allows one to select a goal creating a temporary ontological 
subclass,  find transformations that lead to that goal, and thereby form 
a set of routes to the goal.  Then queries can be sent out to 
datacenters requesting the various classes that lie along the route. 
The work is focused, yet to enable this functionality the semantics must 
be quite in-depth and hopefully of use for other purposes.  For now, 
though, we are working on specific subareas that deal with our use-case 
examples (distances to galaxies, and properties of star clusters).
	I know very little about the effort that Andrea pointed us to.  There 
are many similarities, but of course there are also many differences.  I 
also have heard nothing about specific timelines for semantics be a part 
of the vo main effort so I assume that we are just doing some 
preliminary explorations of it.  It probably would be useful if we could 
combine efforts since the job is quite large, but it is also useful to 
some extent yet keep our separate "competitive" tracks, as you say. And 
since lots of international trips are too expensive for my budget, I 
rely on semantics at ivoa.net for any collaborative work.


Ed
	


Tony Linde wrote:
> We now have two (that I know of: any more?) astro ontologies under
> development: Andrea's and Ed's. Do they both have the same goal or scope?
> Are they interoperable (if such is possible with ontologies)? Will we need a
> translator app if one system uses Andrea's and another uses Ed's?
> 
> I'm all in favour of competing efforts - that's the only way to test ideas -
> but when should we assess them and what criteria should we assess them
> against?
> 
> Cheers,
> Tony.
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