VOEvent and Heliophysics Knowledge Base: new schema

[Brian Thomas]

On Tuesday 30 October 2007, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
> Is there  
> > an example of how the combination of two tokens (in the case of  
> > FilamentEruption) works in practice, either in an existing schema  
> > or other XML doc?
> 
> No, indeed: we've just barely got past the point of agreeing that  
> there should be vocabularies/thesauri.
> 
> Indeed, this need will be common to all VO contexts, so it would be  
> great to have a standard solution.   I once suggested using the  
> rdf:Bag et al. elements, e.g.
> 
>         <rdf:Bag id="LMSAL:FilamentEruption">
>                 <rdf:li resource="ivoat:solarfilaments">
>                 <rdf:li resource="ivoat:eruptions">
>         </rdf:Bag>
> 
> but I admit that it's not an elegant solution (assuming that our  
> computers care).  Our original idea of using a UCD-like may have had  
> many faults, but the ease of concatenation wasn't one of them.  Now  
> that the semantics crew is about to suggest SKOS as the IVOA  
> standard, we've almost defined the path but haven't defined the goal.

I don't think there is any need for use to create our own prescription.
One way is to simply use OWL/RDFS;  One can
simply create a document where you define "FilamentEruption" as the
subclass of "ivoat:solarfilaments" and "ivoat:eruptions", e.g.

<owl:Class rdf:about="&mynamespace;FilamentEruption">
    <rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="&ivoat;eruptions"/>
    <rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="&ivoat;solarfilaments"/>
</owl:Class>

There is probably a way to do this without OWL (but why do that??).

=brian