Astronomical vocabulary explorer

[Ed Shaya]

Franck,
   
    The semantics group settled on creating  Thesauri using the SKOS/RDF 
vocabulary first and then translating that into OWL as needed.  However, 
there is not really an existing SKOS editor to my knowledge.  There is a 
pluggin to the Protege Application that is supposed to do SKOS, but I 
tried it just now and found that it is not really ready for use.
One way forward would be to use an XML editor and an XML Schema for 
vocabularies to create a .XML version and then transform it into 
SKOS/RDF.  If you don't mind using something developed in Britain, you 
could use their e-gov IPSV vocabulary language  
http://www.esd.org.uk/standards/xmlschemas/taxonomy-v3.3.xsd and then 
transform the .xml instance via the Perl script 
http://thesauri.cs.vu.nl/eswc06/ipsv/convertipsv.pl.
    Being an ontology fan, I would go a different route.  One could use 
the ontology of SKOS 
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/owl-dl/skos-core-owl-dl.owl and use 
an OWL or RDF editor.  In this case all of the terms would be 
Individuals (mostly of Concepts).  This is also not optimal, because 
creating individuals is still pretty clumsy in editors like Protege or 
TopQuandrant.  The advantage, is that you would not need to do a 
conversion since it should provide valid SKOS and in the editor you can 
navigate through the related terms by clicking.
    A group of us spent a couple of days creating a Theory ontology and 
an Operations ontology which may be related to what you are doing.  You 
could see what we have so far at 
http://atlas.astro.umd.edu:8080/astro-onto/index.html.  Check out from 
there: PhysicalTheory.owl and Operations.owl.   These are still just 
skeletons though (ie no real meat yet).
    I would be interested in seeing what you produce with Algorithms and 
Simulations, and in fact would like to help out if I can.

Ed

Franck Le Petit wrote:
> Dear Alasdair and others of the Semantics WG,
>
> We are building a vocabulary that will be used in the Simulation 
> Datamodel.  Semantics is required for several "keywords":
> - Physical processes 
> - Algorithms
> - Simulated Object
> - ...
>
> An idea was, on one hand to use A&A keywords for Physical Processes 
> (eventually to complete it ) and, on the other hand, to use The 
> Ontology of Astronomical Objects (for Simulated Object). We would also 
> have to do our own vocabulary for Algorithms.
>
> Up to now we have several lists of keywords. 
>
> May you tell me what is the best way to implement this ? Should we do 
> .RDF files ? And if yes, is there any tool to do it easily, I mean to 
> facilitate the entries and the relationships between words ? 
>
> Best regards
> Franck
>
> ------------------------------------------------
> Franck Le Petit
> LUTH - Observatoire de Paris
> 5 Place Jules Janssen
> 92190 Meudon
> France
> Tel: (33) 1 45 07 75 66
> http://luth.obspm.fr
> ------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
> Le 30 avr. 08 à 11:04, Alasdair Gray a écrit :
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Here is a second attempt to send this mail to the semantics list, 
>> apologies if the first one finally makes it through for some reason.
>>
>> To support the work on the Working Draft, "Vocabularies in the 
>> Virtual Observatory 
>> <http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/vocabularies.html>", I have 
>> developed a web service that:
>>
>>  * Allows a user to search for concepts in the vocabularies by
>>    entering keywords
>>  * Navigate through the returned concepts and explore the
>>    relationships between the concepts
>>
>> The service is available from 
>> http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk/WebVocabularyExplorer/
>>
>> The service uses the five vocabularies 
>> <http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/WD/Semantics/vocabularies-20080320/> 
>> published with the working draft together with one mapping file that 
>> relates the concepts of the A&A Keywords to the AOIM. The mapping 
>> file is available from 
>> http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~agray/Vocab/vocab-1.0/AAkeys2AOIM.ttl 
>> <http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Eagray/Vocab/vocab-1.0/AAkeys2AOIM.ttl>
>>
>> Any comments or feedback about the service is appreciated.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Alasdair
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