New issue?: vocabulary maintenance

[Frederic V. Hessman]

Apropos of:

On 2008 Jan 31, at 21:28, Norman Gray wrote:

 > Perhaps the simplest answer there is to identify some individual or
 > team which will adopt each one of the vocabularies, and negotiate
 > with them, on-list or off. Alasdair produced the A&A and AOIM
 > vocabularies, Rick the IVOAT and constellation ones, Alasdair
 > produced the IAU93 one from a variant of Rick's IVOAT script, and I
 > confess to being unsure of the original authorship of the SKOSified
 > UCD list, or how much of an exercise this was intended to be.
 >
 > Perhaps this is the other half of the answer to Ed's question: can
 > we have volunteers to adopt a vocabulary for a couple of months
 > leading up to the standard? If we can't find adopters, and the
 > vocabulary is inadequate as it stands, then we can drop that
 > vocabulary from the document.

> Of these, I think the core ones are the A&A vocab, the IVOA-T and  
> AOIM.
>

Whoa!  The "core" ones we've been talking about are A&A (no-brainer),  
AOIM (good for internal IVOA politics), UCD (an informal suggestion of  
how to standarize UCD keyword publishing), and IAU-93 (on historical  
principle).   The IVOA-T is definitely not ready to be called "core"  
and we purposefully left it out of the list.
> IAU-93: we might as well include this, because it's easy and done.
>
... and because it's the only really official astronomical thesaurus  
out there!
> UCD: It's mostly done, I gather, I'm not sure we really need a  
> SKOSified version of the UCD list.
>
Do we need the current bizzare ASCII version of the UCD list?
> Constellations: I get the impression this is simple and done, and  
> whether or not it provides a persistent standard, it should be a  
> good example.
>
This was strictly meant as a realistic example of very modest size.   
Since it's officially a real vocabulary and the names are not in  
IAU-93, we can simply keep it officially even though nobody would  
really complain if we didn't (well, the AOIM guys should actually be  
very pleased, but....).
> AT, ATEL, GCN, CBAT, ...: these sound pretty easy, but the list is  
> getting rather long now.
>
I suggest that the VOEvent crew do AT as homework and as an example of  
the first vocabulary to be nominally created outside of the semantics  
working group.

This raises, yet again, the point of finding a permanent place within www.ivoa.net 
  to put these things.....
> Presuming that we'll be wanting to add mappings between these  
> vocabularies (that being half the point of this project), this is  
> starting to look like a lot of work. Perhaps A&A, IVOAT and AOIM  
> would be an adequately large set to include in the standard after all.
>
No, I'd say we should include mappings between A&A and AIOM simply to  
show that it can be done.   Leave the rest for the question of what  
vocabulary is going to be the best lingua franca.  It's tempting to  
use IAU-93, but there are simply too many mistakes and things missing  
and we can't/shouldn't correct for this.

Rick
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