IVOA Vocabularies - WD

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

On Thursday 06 September 2007, Doug Tody wrote:
> Since there are multiple such standards, they can be complex, and
> they keep evolving,

OWL is at this point very mature and very widely deployed in many 
industry applications. SKOS less so, and has a different scope. 

> it may make more sense to store the primary copy 
> of the information in a simple fixed format which we control (such as
> what has been proposed), and perform an automated translation/ingest
> to use the vocabulary with tools based upon one of these other
> advanced technologies.

Well, true, you can do that with GRDDL very easily:
http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/

However, it doesn't make much sense anyway, because the tools you have 
to exploit your custom XML Schema will be 10 years behind the evolution 
of the tools you have to use OWL. So, when you say that:

> One should also keep in mind that we might want to read this
> information into astronomy client applications which just want the
> basic vocabulary, do not need advanced inference capabilities, etc.,
> and do not want to be dependent upon some complex semantic web
> technology.

...what does it imply to use the vocabulary? Does it imply that you just 
tag your resources with terms? And then query your resources with 
XPath, like //foo? Then, I think that you would find SPARQL more 
interesting, 
SELECT ?foo WHERE {<http://example.edu/> ex:tagged ?foo . }

If you do anything more advanced than that, you will probably also find 
that you need to create your own application, whereas with Semantic Web 
technology, you'll find that what you need has allready been created, 
since there is a big industry headed in this direction.

> It should be possible to have it both ways...

It certainly is, and with GRDDL, it has also become very easy. It is 
just that I feel that you're "crossing the stream for water".

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil at kjernsmo.net
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