SV and IAU Thesaurus

[Andrea Preite Martinez]

I repeat here what I said yesterday and Saturday:

Tue, 18 Sep.:
The point of the draft under discussion is not to include all possible  
astronomical terms in the SV, but to be able to express any possible  
astronomical term, locally defined, in terms of standard SV tokens

Saturday, 15 Sep.:
The SV "provides the VO with a common set of standard tokens for  
astronomical objects, processes, events, observations, instruments,  
and concepts which are likely to be needed within all VO contexts."

Astronomers had and have their astronomical vocabularies. They had the  
IAU thesaurus, discontinued in '95 (or '97?) for the retirement of the  
curators.
If you are looking for a Standard Astronomical Vocabulary, please  
start from there:
you'll find also basic relationships as broader, narrower, etc.  
between terms. If a SAV is what you want to build (but is this within  
the scope of the IVOA?),  just refresh the IAU thesaurus with the  
terms and concepts that appeared in the last 10 years.  Gamma Ray  
Bursts, to quote one.
By the way, the astronomers didn't care much for a Thesaurus,  
otherwise it wouldn't had be abandoned 10 years ago.
What astronomers have today is a list (I should say: a few lists, see  
my note on
Astronomical Keywords) of keywords they use to tag their papers. Far  
from a SAV!

Since 2005 we are not discussing SAV: we are discussing of how to  
extend and overcome the limitations in context that are built-in the  
UCDs. These limitations and the need to overcome them were put forward  
not by the UCD wg, not by me, but by those who needed to make  
interoperable not only "quantities" using UCDs, but object types,  
phenomena, instruments, simulations, etc.


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