IVOA Thesaurus

[Eric Saunders]

I think parsing underscores and capital letters *is* trivial. I agree with 
Ed that the readibility is much more important than keeping everything in 
the set a-z.

Eric

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, 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
>>> 
>> 
>

---------------------------------------
Eric Saunders
eSTAR Project (http://www.estar.org.uk)
Astrophysics Group
University of Exeter