Vocabularies WD draft

[Norman Gray]

Greetings, all.

I'd like to invite people here to take a look at the current (0.02)  
draft of the document `Vocabularies in the IVOA'.  It's at

    http://www.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/ 
IvoaSemantics#Latest_documents

This draft has had a few iterations off-list, with a rather amorphous  
and informal cc list.  That was a fairly efficient way of resolving  
some minor issues, and has helped refine the set of more significant  
issues currently associated with the document.  These more  
significant issues are now I think concrete enough to be usefully  
discussable on this IVOA-wide list.  There were some fairly  
significant issues such as the relationship between these  
vocabularies and higher-level ontologies work ongoing in the IVOA,  
but I _believe_ that these were either resolved to broad satisfaction  
on-list before the solstice, or else have been addressed within the  
document.

So fire away!



*** Process ***

The document and the related vocabularies are in a Google Code  
repository at

     http://volute.googlecode.com

The subversion repository is at <http://code.google.com/p/volute/ 
source>.  That page gives instructions on how to check out a read- 
only anonymous copy of the tree; if anyone here wants read-write  
access, mail me a googlemail account name and I'll add you.  If you  
subscribe to the volute-commits list <http://groups.google.com/group/ 
volute-commits> you can see each repository commit as it happens.

There's an issues list at <http://code.google.com/p/volute/issues/ 
list>.  I'm in two minds about this issues list, and wonder if a hand- 
maintained HTML file beside the document source might be preferable.   
It's obviously less functional than this issues list, but might be  
more concrete.  I'm keen to hear comments.

I suspect that we don't want to drown the semantics at ivoa list in a  
lot of minutiae about commas, SKOS serialisations, and makefiles, and  
so suggest having such minor-issue discussions somewhere else.  The  
obvious place is a second google groups list; the next possibility is  
just keeping it as a big cc-list amongst the authors (a bad idea, I  
think); the third is staying on semantics at ivoa until we're told to  
shut up.



*** Next steps ***

At what point does this enter the formal process?  Is it by  
acclamation on this list, or by Andrea's imprimatur?

I don't believe this need be a long process, and hope that we might  
have a pretty complete version of the document in a couple of  
months.  Rick and the other VOEvent people have fairly pressing uses  
for this work; Alasdair and I have separate reasons for wanting to  
embed the vocabularies in other systems; this suggests that we might  
find two implementations which can be reported on at the May  
Interop.  Is it too optimistic to hope that this document might  
therefore go to PR in Trieste?

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK