New issue?: vocabulary maintenance

[Frederic V. Hessman]

On 6 Feb 2008, at 12:29 pm, Alasdair Gray wrote:

>>> 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.
> The big problem with the IAU-93 is that there are no definitions for  
> the terms. This is another reason we need to get the IVOAT, or at  
> least an early version of it, ready for use. However, there will  
> ultimately be the need for mappings between pairs of vocabularies as  
> it may not always be possible to express these by going through a  
> central vocabulary.

Strictly speaking, 99% of the "definitions" in the present IVOAT are  
simply human-readable versions of the token names.  The few exceptions  
are mostly new entries like the atomic elements (e.g. "actinium" has  
the description "actinium (atomic number 89)") or a few where the  
meaning needed to be more precise or isn't commonly known (e.g.  
BaileyType).    Thus, one could create minimal descriptions also for  
the IAU-93 thesaurus by simply de-capitalizing.   I did this for the  
IVOAT, but I admit it took a bit more than just running a python  
script over it to get it right.

Rick