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

[Frederic V. Hessman]

> 	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.
> 	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.

The main objection to avid adoption to date has been (at least my  
understanding)
	- not supported so many terms missing or out-of-date
	- explicit ontological organization (this is a boon or a bane,  
depending upon your inclination)
	- translations available but not descriptions (it's a thesaurus, not  
a dictionary)

> 	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.

Then a few (but not too many) kudos are due :-)

> 	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.

There are no definitions, just translations of the labels.  Free  
multi-linguality is cute, but not really the point right now.

The amount of NT's and BT's in the  thesaurus is a reasonable model  
of the level of detail I'd like to see in the vocabularies - just  
enough to make things useful but so very little that one isn't  
tempted to declare it a real ontology.  Rather less would be just right.

Rick

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Dr. Frederic V. Hessman     Hessman at Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE
Institut für Astrophysik          Tel.  +49-551-39-5052
Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1         Fax +49-551-39-5043
37077 Goettingen                 Room F04-133
http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman
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