Format of tokens (was Re: Fwd: Re: IVOA Thesaurus)

[Matthew Graham]

Hi,

I think that Norman's ideas actually make quite good sense.

    Cheers,

    Matthew

Douglas Burke wrote:
> Brian Thomas wrote:
>> On Thursday 01 November 2007 1:06:55 pm 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?
>>
>> Could we have the arguments against human readable again first, 
>> before voting?
>
>
> Brian,
>
> Norman wrote the following in an email on Oct 10 - Versions and 
> namespaces (was: Vocab AND Ontology?) - where >> indicates a quite 
> from Rick.
>
> HTH,
> Doug
>
>
> >>   I personally find the revamped token list to be much more 
> palatable (which is obviously why I did it), being nearly human-usable 
> (I don't like to be shouted at by capitalized tokens) and with 
> implicit additional info (e.g. formal names of people and objects).
>
> Doug brought up the issue of how to generate the concept names, as URI 
> fragments.  This is a stylistic point, but I think an important one.
>
> I'd like to suggest a rather drastic canonicalisation, so that "He+ 
> ionization zone" would turn into #heionizationzone.  This is a 
> pragmatic middle ground between having the concept name mirror the 
> label, and having it fully opaque (such as #concept12345).
>
> Having it consist of only lowercase alpha means (a) we're guaranteed 
> to avoid any parsing troubles, with RDF parsers or with anything else; 
> (b) it's clear to anyone looking at this that they're not supposed to 
> be displaying the concept name, but using the concept's 'Label' and 
> declared relationships instead; while (c) it retains some mnemonic value.
>
> There is a case which can be made for having fully opaque concept 
> names (this is what's done in the Gene Ontology, for example): it's 
> point (b) above, plus it removes any temptation to argue about 
> relationships based on the name alone.  Despite that, I think there's 
> value in making it at least partly human-recognisable.
>
>