Versions and namespaces (was: Vocab AND Ontology?)

[Norman Gray]

Rick,

On 2007 Oct 8, at 16:09, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:

>>   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).

Doug brought up the issue of how to generate the concept names, as  
URI fragments.  This is a stylistic point, but I think an important one.

I'd like to suggest a rather drastic canonicalisation, so that "He+  
ionization zone" would turn into #heionizationzone.  This is a  
pragmatic middle ground between having the concept name mirror the  
label, and having it fully opaque (such as #concept12345).

Having it consist of only lowercase alpha means (a) we're guaranteed  
to avoid any parsing troubles, with RDF parsers or with anything  
else; (b) it's clear to anyone looking at this that they're not  
supposed to be displaying the concept name, but using the concept's  
'Label' and declared relationships instead; while (c) it retains some  
mnemonic value.

There is a case which can be made for having fully opaque concept  
names (this is what's done in the Gene Ontology, for example): it's  
point (b) above, plus it removes any temptation to argue about  
relationships based on the name alone.  Despite that, I think there's  
value in making it at least partly human-recognisable.

Rick quoting Brian:
>> 	So, I see 2 different ways to proceed here, either:
>>
> 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.

+1

I feel there would be value (if only neatness or completeness) in  
creating a SKOSified version of the IAU thesaurus as-is, including  
the errors and deficiencies that have been identified, and at the  
same time releasing a mildly tidied version, declaring the relevant  
concepts to be equivalent in almost all cases.  That's a <http:// 
ns.ivoa.net/IAU-1993#> and <http://ns.ivoa.net/IAU-v0.1#>

Norman


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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK