Beyond the draft proposal

[Frederic Hessman]

Starting to think beyond the IVOA draft proposal:

Right now, the IVOAT vocabulary (a cleaned-up version of the old IAU  
thesaurus) doesn't really cover everything one might need, e.g.  there  
are the folowing (expressed as tokens)

	JohnsonPhotometry
	RMagnitude
	Filter

so don't we really need

	RFilter

or even

	JohnsonRFilter?

This is an issue if the only way to use tokens is via rdf:resource :  
can one use

	<myFilter rdf:resource="ivoat:SloanPhotometry"  
rdf:resource="ivoat:filter" rdf:resource="rMagnitude"/>

One could argue that IVOAT is already too bloated (it is) and that the  
best approach would be to divide it up into sub-vocabularies, e.g.

	math (since this goes far beyond astronomy alone and may need to be  
coupled with an international math vocabulary)

		<myFraction rdf:resource="math:fraction"/>

	physics (Ibid)

		<mySimuulation rdf:resource="physics:gravitation"/>

	instruments

		<myFilter rdf:resource="instr:filter"/>

	geology

		<myPlanetaryFeature rdf:resource="geo:volcano"/>

	sources

		<myTarget name="M81" rdf:resource="src:quasar"/>

	....

Obviously, this can easily result in a flood of mini-vocabularies  
where no one knows where what can be found.  On the other hand, do we  
really need SloanPhotometry alongside with Volcano in the same  
vocabulary?

Thus, I think it's about time we also discussed what all this whoop- 
dee-doo about vocabularies is actually good for and how the process/ 
programmer/user on the street is supposed to deal with them.
	
Rick