Vocab AND Ontology?

[Frederic V. Hessman]

> From: Brian Thomas <thomas-at-astro.umd.edu>
> > 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.
>
> 	My main, and I hope salient, comments other than praise concern
> 	the use of namespaces in the document. 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#
Oh, I wasn't intending to remain the center of the semantic universe,  
but just to provide a concrete path which somebody might actually  
want to use/test.  Not having access to ivoa.net, this was the  
simplest thing to do.   With a few lines of PHP or some Wiki, I bet  
someone could produce a site at http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/ where we  
could all edit at our leisure and then everything would always be  
current AND official (even if this is just a proto-proposal).

> 	Also, any of the new terms which have been introduced should belong
> 	to a different 'namespace' from the IAU Thesaurus per-se. While I  
> will
> 	not quibble about the need for additional terms, I do think its not
> 	desirable to mix in stuff which is not properly part of the official
> 	namespace of the Thesaurus. I doubt we are the official body for
> 	declaring a new version of this document.

On some level, you're right, but Rob also pointed out that the IVOA  
and Commission 5 of the IAU could easily pull together on this.   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).

> 	So, I see 2 different ways to proceed here, either:
>
> 	1. Rename the work you have done to uniform, new namespace,
> 	e.g. "VO Standard Vocabulary".
>
> 	=or=
>
> 	2.  Make a document which imports all of the various bits which will
> 	comprise the standard vocabulary, (e.g. VO SV is the sum of a  
> variety of
> 	namespaces, e.g. IAU Thesaurus + VOEvent terms + etc.)

Again, point well taken, but I think we achieve the same thing by  
proposing a new, improved thesaurus which is 98% original while ALSO  
indicating how additional vocabularies (i.e. additional namespaces)  
could be used just as well (e.g. UCD).  Then everyone can start  
playing with the new thesaurus for starts, knowing that it should  
cover most of what we need, but also with the intent of creating new  
vocabularies for filling in the many gaps (e.g. I started looking at  
the list of astronomically relevant molecules, but then decided this  
would be a great project for someone else!).

So, I suggest we follow Brian's path #1.5 ("best of both worlds").    
If we find some librarian somewhere who actually USES the old IAU  
thesaurus - heaven forbid! - we can always produce an IVOA-conforming  
vocabulary document which does the reverse translation.

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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