Vocab AND Ontology?

[Brian Thomas]

On Tuesday 09 October 2007, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
> By and large a simple exercise, particularly since many already exist, but one sees how this process has to 
> asymptotically converge BY DEFINITION, not by time or effort.  May I suggest that the state of the Vocabulary/Thesaurus 
> be fixed by the end of this week - last chance for last-minute additions!  Whatever you can't find after that must not 
> have been very important.   

	Not sure I agree that we have just a week to finish additions/corrections!
	I would think that we should simply version the Thesaurus. Your call for 
	and end to the process should be for a given version (whatever that may be,
	v1.0, 0.1, 0.001?). Expect and plan for an ongoing process of improvement
	and changes.

> 
> Rob's suggestion of splitting things into the original thesaurus (or at least a corrected version of the old thesaurus - 
> mixed cases, underbars, and lots of tokens shifted into ALTs) and new additions would be a pain, given the amount 
> of cleaning up we've done, but if ya'll want it that way and as long as it means that the WG makes a decision about 
> how to handle multiple vocabularies: ivorn formats, normative file formats, suggested translation infrastructure (e.g. 
> references to math:ellipses).  If this will take too long, I vote for one giant starting vocabulary based upon the IAU 
> but with all the present corrections/additions.     

	It may be a pain, but its worth doing IMO. At the least, I continue to vote for breaking the thesaurus up into 
	sub-parts by category. I peeked into Ed's office this morning and was happy to see that he was doing 
	this with a 'shadow' ontology based on the Thesaurus. 

> 
> Wait a minute - a great idea: wouldn't the IAU/IVOA thesaurus be a GREAT place to put all the STC shortcuts?!  
> How else are we to know where to find them?  Or create a STC shortcut vocabulary as a new, practical, and 
> exemplary example.  

	I'm not so sure, and at this point I would 'vote NO'. The thesaurus is quite large as it is, and really should
	focus on an 'updated IAU' set of terms. STC encompasses a number of structures which are (IMO) outside
	of time/space (it has hooks which are for integration with VOTable, and its own form of a Quantity + Units
	to name a few).

	STC should have its own, separate ontology, although I would hope that it would re-use terms from the 
	Thesaurus (eventually).

	=brian