Vocabulary: Ontology

[Rob Seaman]

On Sep 12, 2007, at 7:52 AM, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:

> I was about to write that I'd rather not add on OWL as well (oh no!  
> yet another semantic sub-working-group to convice), but then I  
> realized that all my uses of the vocabulary would be able to simply  
> ignore the ontological info, happily putting up with the  
> ontological baggage as a small price to pay for having a vocabulary  
> of tokens.  If our original idea of "simple" translations  
> (comparisons of the "equivalences" between vocabularies) has been  
> utterly superceeded by modern semantic software technology (don't  
> worry about the translations and let someone's fancy software do it  
> for you automatically), then we can leave out my  
> <voc:isEquivalentTo>'s entirely and use vanilla SKOS.

I'd like further info on the "fancy software".  There is no  
assumption with VOEvent that the packets are even being parsed by a  
general-purpose XML engine.  A packet needs to be able to stand alone  
while simultaneously being able to benefit from modern semantic  
techniques.  We certainly can't wait on uncontrolled web services  
responding as part of a workflow.

> If someone can suggest a basic RDF pattern which expresses what  
> you'd like to see and what we wanted to express - a minimum of  
> ontological info - then I'd be happy to produce the complete SKOS  
> (draf) vocabularies.

I think this is a worthy exercise whether or not this new prototype,  
in turn, ever leads to an official work product of the group.  Should  
be a great topic for the VOEvent BoF and/or IVOA session.

- Rob