Vocabulary+SV

[Andrea Preite Martinez]

Dear all,

I think criticism is always useful, even when the way it is expressed  
goes beyond the understanding of those that are criticized. I wonder  
why the same
criticism has not been put forward for e.g. data models, to which rdf  
is probably more appropriate than xml schemas.

But let's take it positively, and try to see what we can firmly keep  
and what can be modified.

The main motivation of our paper is "interoperability".
Different groups talking different astronomical dialects can  
understand each other just declaring what the "equivalence" of their  
concepts is against a standard way to define those concepts. This is  
the original problem raised by the VOEvent WG when trying to fill up  
the "what" field and be sure to be understood by other communities.
But other groups have the same problem.
The solution we propose is a sort of astronomical "lingua franca" or  
"esperanto" (the SV + UCD).
This principle we should strongly keep.
In practice, how to format and store the vocabularies is in a way  
secondary, and it's a function of what use is envisaged (now and later  
on) for those vocabularies. At present, just a simple text/tabular  
form can do the job (btw, we actually start from a simple text file to  
generate the xml file!).
Later on, one could ask to perform on that information more complicate  
actions, the nature of which is difficult to establish now.
But we should keep the door open.

Here comes the second point addressed in the paper: the format of the  
vocabularies. We treated it in the first place, and this possibly gave  
the readers the wrong impression that it was our first priority.
Should we drastically change this part of the paper, e.g. transforming  
the xml into rdf of other?

My point of view is:
- Yes, if the present format is preventing further evolution and use.
- Else: No. But we should add that the format (simple-txt or xml) can  
be easily transformed into something more suitable to fulfil the  
needs, should they evolve.

Andrea


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Andrea Preite Martinez                 andrea.preitemartinez at iasf-roma.inaf.it
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