Ontology assessment?

[Tony Linde]

The work sounds fascinating, Ed. I've only seen the ontologies you produced - is the 
actual project described anywhere in more detail that we could access?

T.
-- 
Tony Linde

Ed Shaya wrote:
> 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.