Vocab AND Ontology?

[Rob Seaman]

Brian Thomas wrote:

> 	Hi Frederic,
>
> 	First off, great work!

Indeed.  Of course, we've told Rick this several times over the past  
couple of years in the VOEvent group.  Perhaps one of his concept  
list dohickeys will stick one of these days :-)

> Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
>
>> 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),

Who is "we"?  Has there been some official policy promulgated that  
the Virtual Observatory shall produce no facilities useful for  
historical purposes?  Indeed unlikely to be useful for VOEvent, but  
perhaps RTML could benefit when describing legacy instrumentation :-)

> First, I'd change
>
> http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE/~hessman/rdf/IAU#
>
> 	to something more VO/IAU-ish, eg.
>
> http://ivoa.net/rdf/IAUThesaurus#

Obviously Rick is pointing to an internal copy for discussion purposes.

> 	Also, any of the new terms which have been introduced should belong
> 	to a different 'namespace' from the IAU Thesaurus per-se.

Likely true.

> 	I doubt we are the official body for
> 	declaring a new version of this document.

Um.  Not obvious.  The Thesaurus is available from:

	http://msowww.anu.edu.au/library/thesaurus

The acknowledgements state:

"Version 1.1 compiled for the International Astronomical Union,  
Commission 5 (Documentation)"

And indeed the Commission 5 WG on Libraries (http://www.eso.org/gen- 
fac/libraries/IAU-WGLib) claims stewardship of the Thesaurus.   
However, Commission 5 also is home to the VO WG and presumably the  
two WGs would work together (much as Semantics and VOEvent do) to  
resolve issues crossing their two domains.  Presumably we should  
contact the Libraries WG chairs (http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/libraries/ 
IAU-WGLib/chairpersons.html) when there is a solid version ready for  
comment.

It seems to me that all by itself, an IVOA enhanced IAU Thesaurus  
comprises a useful work product that is likely to be of interest to  
the community.  In general, the IVOA benefits from, and is  
responsible to, the same IAU satrapies as the rest of astronomy.

- Rob