SV and Thesaurus - decide

[Frederic V. Hessman]

Of course, I vote YES.

> Movie A is the SV as proposed in the draft paper. It is a  
> (proposed) collection of standard, centrally defined and maintained  
> list of tokens that allows to express any possible astronomical  
> term, locally defined.
> It is not specifically meant for humans, but human readable. There  
> is no associated ontological structure. A simple basic grammar  
> allows putting together SV tokens to express complex concepts or  
> concatenation of concepts. It is not particularly devised to be a  
> component of the user I/F of a searching tool, to help a user to  
> refine his search.
>
> Movie B is intended as *the* standard list of astronomical terms,  
> centrally defined and maintained.
> It is (also) meant for humans.
> Its use within the VO needs to be clarified. Under discussion is  
> the degree of ontological information to associate to the terms of  
> such list.
> The starting point to build it can be the old IAU Thesaurus. Much  
> longer than Movie A, but size is not a problem.(see note below)
>
> Movie A (the SV) is in the editing phase. For Movie B (the  
> Thesaurus) we need a script and a producer. Well, enough with the  
> movie metaphor!
>
> I call for a decision on the SV draft.
> After reading it, please post your opinion (possibly by the end of  
> the september):
>
> YES, we can go on discussing/commenting/editing it, with the  
> ultimate goal to define an IVOA SV standard.
> NO, let's stop wasting our time on the SV.
In order to help others vote, here's is a link to a re-furbished IAU  
thesaurus just waiting for someone to turn it trivially into a SKOS,  
RDF, or some other formatted IAU-compliant vocabulary, including  
tokens (original IAU labels with spaces replaced by "_"), labels,  
descriptions, alternative labels, links to broader-, narrower-,  
related- and suggested-tokens, places for different language  
versions, .... :

	http://www.astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~hessman/rdf/ASCII/ 
IAU_Thesaurus.txt

Info starts with "#" and the rest is a trivially tabbed-structured,  
looking like...

...
ASTROPHYSICS
	D
		"astrophysics"
	N
		"combine with other terms"
	UF
		theoretical_astrophysics
	BT
		ASTRONOMY
	RT
		COSMOLOGY
ASYMPTOTIC_GIANT_BRANCH
	D
		"asymptotic giant branch"
	A
		"AGB"
	RT
		HERTZSPRUNG_RUSSELL_DIAGRAM
		LATE_TYPE_GIANT_STARS
ATAXITES
	D
		"ataxites"
	BT
		METEORITES
...

I've added NO tokens, removed a few but only when they consistuted  
trivial aliases where the alternative label is a fully compatible IAU  
thesaurus equivalent (see "A" tags), and added a few obvious acronyms  
(e.g. "GRB" for the already present GAMMA_RAY_BURSTS), and actually  
constructed mini-descriptions based on the original tokens, including  
corrections for capitalizing person and variable star names.

As you can imagine, this really wasted my afternoon, but if it helps....

I've started looking to see what's missing (e.g. original SV list of  
tokens), and lots of obvious things are popping up (planet names),  
but shouldn't be too bad if everyone helps (e.g. put the list of  
tokens and/or labels into a simple search tool).   Yes, the present  
list is really too long, but - hey! - it's the OFFICIAL LIST, so  
nobody can complain if the IVOA makes an official vocabulary out of  
it, and if we actually include the minimal amount of ontological info  
that the IAU WANTED.

Rick

P.S. Someone warned against using underscores ("_"), but this was the  
only straight-forward way of turning the space-separted strings into  
usable tokens.  I also removed the square brackets.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
-------------------------
MONET: a MOnitoring NEtwork of Telescopes
http://monet.Uni-Goettingen.de
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