Vocabulary: Ontology

[Alasdair Allan]

Rob Seaman wrote:
> Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
>> ...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.

I've been trying really hard to stay out of this one, but I'd like to  
back up Rob's point here. We can't put a call to a web service, to do  
some sort of ontological lookup, inside the loop where a piece of  
software is trying to decide what a specific bit of data in a VOEvent  
packet means. Not in a real time system, it just is going to take too  
much time during a  decision where seconds could be crucial.

>> 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.

Yes, we're going to have to talk about this, or something like it,  
during the VOEvent session.

Al.