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

[Brian Thomas]

On Thursday 01 November 2007 5:50:14 pm Matthew Graham wrote:
> > 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.

So..it would seem that the strongest reason is a). Point b) is really a stylistic
one (but it seems to require that we always provide rdf:label when this
style of naming concepts is in effect).

Ed's point that underscores can help to disambiguate names which need
'spaces' also seems to have some value. I note that you really can't
go part way, either something is human-recognizable, or it isn't. If 
con_science is not to be confused with conscience then I suppose
the author of the node can invent some convention to suit their needs, but 
its likely to take up more characters (like 'conunderscorescience'). 

Is there really a parser out there which can't handle an underscore? Or is 
it that people are worried that if we allow this one non-alphanumeric 
character more will follow?

So...unless I hear dire predictions of "slippery slope, slippery slope" or
how any RDF parser can't handle underscores in names I'm mildly in 
favor of the underscore.

=brian