Vocab AND Ontology?

[Frederic V. Hessman]

Just in case you have been wondering whether the Vocab/ontology  
discussion has petered out, here's my contribution to a concrete  
proposal.   Following Norman's re-formatting of the A&A and AOIM  
vocabularies into SKOS, a completely re-furbished version of the IAU  
thesaurus can be perused at

		http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE/~hessman/rdf

including

	- a totally reworked, tentatively normative text file, including  
corrections, considerable reduction in the number of tokens (via  
aliases), re-writing the original upper case tokens in useable format  
(including capitalization of names, correct use of hyphens);
	- a SKOS file containing the thesaurus (should be formally useable);  
and
	- simple HTML documentation (token list, alias list, dictionary with  
comments about major revisions) to make perusal of the contents more  
bearable.

Yes, the IAU thesaurus is larger than we'd prefer and contains lots  
of historical baggage (no, we don't need a token for Ramsden  
eyepieces), but it's there, is official, was "easily" extended to  
include more modern concepts (e.g. Type Ia supernovae weren't quite  
as important in the 80's and so were left out!) and could just as  
easily be extended to cover the other things needed by, e.g., VOEvent.

I'm sure we could agree on a better text format to conform to  
standard ontology usage, but everything should be self-explanatory.

Enjoy!

Rick

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Dr. Frederic V. Hessman     Hessman at Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE
Institut für Astrophysik          Tel.  +49-551-39-5052
Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1         Fax +49-551-39-5043
37077 Goettingen                 Room F04-133
http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman
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