Voting on gormat of tokens (was Re: IVOA Thesaurus)

[Douglas Burke]

I vote for there being some form of 
normalization/canonicalization/some-other-ization of the Human-readable 
terms. The important ones for me are all lower case (as I've found too 
many errors in my own work from case mismatches [*]) and the removal of 
problematic characters (or combinations of characters). I don't have a 
real opinion on whether spaces should be removed or replaced by "_".

[* Are there issues with this particular choice in Ed's ontology 
use-case below?]

Doug

Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
> At the time, there where lots of voices saying that, while you are 
> perfectly correct (and I'd prefer to have them as humanly readable as 
> possible), the realities of computer-based parsing mean that a trivial 
> token format costs less pain.
> 
> How about an official show of hands?
> 
> Rick
> 
> On 1 Nov 2007, at 5:32 pm, Ed Shaya wrote:
> 
>> Rick,
>>
>>    Well, I vote to put back the underscores and the capitalization 
>> where appropriate.  There is no need to go out of one's way and make 
>> all IDs cryptic just to make a point about the concept of tokens.  In 
>> ontology these become the element names of instances and it is really 
>> handy to be able to readily discern what kind of instance it is by 
>> looking, rather than going to some lookup table.  We need some 
>> prescience here, not to be confused with pre_science.
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
>>>
>>> On 31 Oct 2007, at 6:54 pm, Ed Shaya wrote:
>>>
>>>> What happened to the underscores between all of the compound words?
>>>> Ed
>>>
>>> A while back, we communally decided that the tokens should be as 
>>> compact and simple as possible, i.e. no caps, no diacritical marking, 
>>> no spaces, no underscores, not only to make them syntactically simple 
>>> but to emphasize that they are only tokens.  The text file still has 
>>> the underscores, but now only for historical reasons (i.e. the 
>>> original SV proposal).
>>>
>>> If everyone would rather see the underscores back again, no problem.
>>>
>>> Rick
>>>
>>
> 
>