IVOAT

[Frederic V. Hessman]

On 29 Nov 2007, at 4:31 pm, Ed Shaya wrote:

> .....

(lots of corrections - thanks Ed!)

> fundamental chemical element should be chemical element.

You're right, but IAU93 uses NT's of "chemical element" like  
"isotope", "heavy element", etc., so "fundamental chemical element"  
was the simplest solution when adding the explicit elements.    A  
better idea where we can unload the old NT's?

> Also, I have additional terms that could be added on gamma-ray  
> burster types and other things.  Do you want to wait until after  
> version 1.0 is accepted?


By all means pass them on.  If there are any major holes when we try  
to pull this off, then people will say "Hey - this is useless: it  
doesn't even include XYZ!".  Of course, we will ignore the comments  
like "... it doesn't even include leftHandedMonkeyWrench or  
siderialDriveSprocketLubricant".

Suggestions of things to throw out are also welcome.

I recommend "Zen and the Art of Vocabulary Maintenance".

As a bon-bon, I've added a "Sky" vocabulary containing all of the IAU  
constellation names, with the genitive and 3-letter abbreviations:

	http://www.astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~hessman/rdf/Sky/index.html

This could be the model for the vocabularies that we could create by  
dividing up IVOAT into it's principle components:

	- physics
	- chemistry
	- math (see http://www.astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~hessman/rdf/ 
math/index.html)
	- astronomy
	- iau (in the sense of official IAU definitions like constellation  
names)
	- technology/instruments/....

which could make IVOAT more digestible - rather than gorging  
ourselves at once, we reduce the semantic problem to several  
appetizing courses.  The major drawback is having to deal with many  
different RDF files in order to do a particular generic astronomical  
task, but.....

Rick