Beyond the draft proposal

[Ed Shaya]

Rick,
   
    I have done a first cut of breaking up the IVOAT in the process of 
creating an Ontology.  So far I have regrouped terms into namespaces: 
astronomy, physics, chemistry, instrumentation, and "general" (which is 
called IVOAO).  The general one has stuff that didn't fit elsewhere or 
were words that are common English words.   I will soon put some of 
these into math, (and a subset of math for geometry alone), and earth 
science.  I put all of the spectroscopic terms into chemistry which 
gives much credit to Analytical Chemistry and perhaps unfairly demotes 
the role of physicsts in this, but it is simpler this way and not too 
much should be read into the significance of a term being in one 
namespace versus another.

The ontologies are at http://archive.astro.umd.edu/ont (which is a 
redirect into the SVN repository at 
http://archive.astro.umd.edu/ivoa-onto/src/main/resources/.
There is also an OWLDOC (HTML) version at 
http://atlas.astro.umd.edu:8080/astro-onto/index.html, but it is not 
always up to date with the latest SVN commit.

There is also a Mavin jar for the entire ontology.  Let me know if you 
have any interest in that.

Ed



http://atlas.astro.umd.edu:8080/astro-onto/index.html

Frederic Hessman wrote:
> 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
>
>