Definitions, costs and use-cases

[Frederic V. Hessman]

> Mathilda is reading a paper online.

> She types the (A&A) keywords for the paper into VOExplorer and asks  
> for 'more like this'.

No, Mathilda klicks the "Related Information" button in the online  
journal and then... due to the magic that the A&A keywords have been  
translated into (at least one set of ) standard tokens by the  
semantics WG, enabling ALL of the interesting content to be trivially  
cross-indexed, ....

> VOExplorer calls out to a service which finds the AOIM and Simbad  
> equivalences of the A&A keywords,

No, the journal passes on the tokens to a VOExplorer server without  
Mathilda even knowing what's going on.

> and uses the former to query a suitable service to find some pretty  
> pictures, and the latter to query Simbad, presenting the two lists  
> to Mathilda. There aren't many pretty pictures, so Mathilda asks to  
> expand the search, and VOExplorer asks for pretty pictures  
> corresponding to a more general term, found either directly in the  
> AOIM vocabulary, or finding a more general SImbad term and finding  
> the AOIM equivalent of that. The Simbad query, on the other hand,  
> has produced far too many hits, so VOExplorer looks down the tree  
> of Simbad terms which are 'narrower', and asks 'you were looking  
> for compact objects: do you mean black holes, quasars, or...?' Once  
> she has established a suitable keyword or keywords, she can make a  
> queries using the equivalent terms in whichever vocabularies the  
> registry or VOEvent keywords are drawn from. She finds some  
> heterodyne observations (apologies if this is astronomical  
> nonsense, but...), but she's an X-ray person, so is a bit vague,  
> and curious, about just what that is -- but oooh, there's a link to  
> DBpedia/wikipedia, so she goes there on the off-chance the article  
> is decent.

I could have also made my minor corrections here as well, but here's  
my added-value: if the contents of the journal paper had been simply  
cross-referrenced via standard tokens, then the journal would have  
been able to talk directly to VOExplorer or SIMBAD or ask the HTN to  
make some observations, or......   simply because the stupid  
computers would know they are talking about the same thing.   Really  
primitive but really powerful.  For this first stage, you don't need  
an ontology, you simply need to know SPIRAL_GALAXY means what  
Mathilda would have typed ("spiral galaxy") if your stupid app would  
have forced her to tell it something trivial.

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