WD-Ontology

[Andrea Preite Martinez]

> Should I continue on in providing definitional statements of the
> AstroObjects?  I didn't get any comments on the ones so far, and I
> don't know what that means;

Ed,

thank you for your contribution.

The reason why we didn't react immediately is that we are presently  
inserting measurements in the ontology.
As I said already (I think!) we are building the ontology having in  
mind, possibly for each astronomical object, to describe its  
properties according to different points of view. The first we call it  
morphology, but also includes a description of components and/or  
parts. The second point of view is focused on physical processes,  
acting on the object or generating its observational properties.
The last (for the moment!) point of view emphasizes measurements and  
observables.

Each new definition needs to be "projected" along these points of  
view, which means that it has to be coherent, if possible, with the  
existing corpus of properties for that particular "view".  If this is  
not the case, the introduction of new properties (in the sense of  
description logic) has to be carefully evaluated in terms of overall  
cost-to-benefits for future utilizations.

Therefore, any new definition ? or multiple definition of the same  
object, in the sense explained above - is not only welcome but  
necessary, because it will help us in completing / improving the  
ontology by extracting / distilling the needed information.  
Integrating new conditions into the ontology is then a question of  
balance of expressiveness against complexity, and performances in  
reasoning.

Cheers,

Andrea

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Andrea Preite Martinez                 andrea.preitemartinez at iasf-roma.inaf.it
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