Beyond the draft proposal

[Brian Thomas]

Hi Alasdair, all,

On Tuesday 05 February 2008, Alasdair Gray wrote:
> Brian Thomas wrote:
> >
> > 	I'm aware they are different, however, I don't like messy things,
> > 	and its not clear to me that a vocabulary is purely for human-machine
> > 	interaction, as seems to be implied above. Perhaps it is, but I still
> > 	don't understand why that makes the vocabulary necessiarily messy. 
> > 	Having a controlled, clean set of unique tokens, seems to me a very good
> > 	thing. 
> If the compound terms are going to be in common usage by the astronomers 
> who will ultimately be using the ivoa software that makes use of the 
> vocabularies then they need to be first class citizens in the vocabulary 
> and not derived from some grammar for combining terms.

	I have no argument with this, but are you sure that all compound terms
	are needed/useful? I suppose this is an eye of the beholder sort of thing,
	some of these compound terms look nasty to me.

> > Do we really have to canvas every possible meaning, and way of
> > 	expressing that meaning, into the vocabulary? Some terms seem to be
> > 	of very limited utility. I point to the earlier example  of having "volcano" 
> > 	included as a token/term.
> >   
> It depends on how wide you want the coverage of your vocabulary to be. 
> If the idea of the IVOAT is to cover all terms then yes, they all need 
> to be in there. This does not preclude the setting up of smaller, more 
> focused vocabularies with clearly defined mappings to the IVOAT.

	Well, perhaps it is time to ask (and I suppose this is the sort of thing
	Frederick was getting at earlier), what is the purpose of the IVOAT?

	From my own point of view:

	As I have written earlier, we are in bad need of a list of standard tokens
	which identify astronomical objects, as well as instrumentation, and
	all the other concepts which are involved in doing Astronomy and online
	research. I don't know how to define the exact scope of the vocabulary better
	than that. Probably what I just listed could result in 60,000 terms if one
	is fairly pedantic, but I would hope it would be smaller than that..if only
	because it would take years to get a 60,000 word vocabulary assembled
	and agreed on...
	
> [snip]
> >  
> >   
> >> And I think the result _should_ look much like the IAU original.  My  
> >> impression of what was being aimed at in the IVOAT was a tidied up and  
> >> updated IAU93.  Let's keep it simple and quick.
> >>     
> >
> > 	Yes, well, we are beyond simple and quick now. To my mind that would
> > 	have encompassed no more than technical editing (just enough to get 
> > 	the IVOAT into SKOS). But we have added terms and have (at last count)
> > 	4 vocabularies in total (are all of those going into the draft??). So its a 
> > 	matter of opinion that the process has been sufficiently limited.
> >   
> The skos version of the IAUT should not alter its content at all. 
> However, the IVOAT should contain the concepts that are in use now.

	Agreed.

> >   
> >> [snip]
> >
> > Soo.. you are in favor of including something beyond repeating the token
> > name under skos:description? 
> >   
> I would say that the IAUT, A&A keywords and AOIM vocabularies will 
> unfortunately not contain very good definitions as the original source 
> vocabularies are lacking in this area. However, the IVOAT *should*, 
> actually *must*, contain definitions of all of the concepts, otherwise 
> the whole exercise is wasted as no-one will know the true meaning of the 
> concepts. Whether taking these from on-line dictionaries is the best 
> approach is open for debate.

	Well, machine assignment, as a starter, is a good thing.  I didn't 
	say we just let the machine assign stuff and forget about it. But 
	in my experience, definitions form WordNet usually give you the right 
	definition with no trouble at all. Absolutely, a human needs to validate all
	the entries, but its faster to have the machine generate most of the
	text and then a human checking (and editing as needed) rather than 
	the human going it alone and typing it all in.

	Regards,

	=brian

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alasdair
>