Derive SV from the IAU Thesaurus : (Was: Re: SV: do we need it?

[Brian Thomas]

On Wednesday 19 September 2007, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
>  > It has been suggested that the need for the SV is obvious and  
> pressing. Is
>  > it? What for? Maybe people could reply to this with their own views.
> 
> > One of the original motivations for the SV came from DAL/DM: we  
> > have a need to describe the type of astronomical object observed  
> > (Target.Class), or search for data for a particular class of object  
> > (TargetClass input parameter) and found that, while some partial  
> > compilations of this type had been created within astronomy, there  
> > was nothing comprehensive.
> >

	Hmm. I should have raised this before, but what about the IAU 
	Thesaurus? Even if its not supported since mid-90's its pretty
	comprehensive. It even has some files available online from which
	the project may be jump-started. 

(list of terms in several languages: http://www.aao.gov.au/lib/multiling.txt);
(Trex files. These include simple hierarchical ordering, so your 'broader/narrow'
defs are already prepared for you! check out:
http://www.aao.gov.au/lib/thesaurus.html and download one of the 'trex' bundles)

	So.. with these machine parse-able text files available, which seem to supply
	both multilingual aliases, and hierarchy of terms, and the bonus of this being
	as 'official' a source as one might hope to encounter, I would find it a difficult
	argument to NOT use this.

	Perhaps there are too many terms? In this case then, why not simply cherry 
	pick terms? Clearly additional terms which have come into use since 
	the last publication are going to be needed, alongside some bridging terms, 
	but you can hardly go wrong with using this source, and I would urge
	not (re-)inventing stuff that is already in there. Perhaps the work in the 
	recent draft is already based on the Thesaurus (mea culpa: I haven't had 
	time to read it), kudos if this is the case. 

	I also want to  add that while machine-understandability is the definite
	goal of such a dictionary, it should also have human-readable definitions
	for the terms embedded in the document. Without this kind of 
	'self-documentation' you eventually get into problems of what the
	original meaning of the term was supposed to be (some terms
	will be ambiguous). Again, the IAU thesaurus is invaluable here, as it 
	already supplies these definitions, and it might be enough to put in
	an annotation pointing to that term in the published work.

	=brian