Meeting about IVOA Vocabularies

[Gray, Alasdair J G]

This all sounds very interesting and like a lot of work is to be done.

I’ll be interested to see how you progress and what the longer term actions will be.

Alasdair


On 11 May 2016, at 13:30, Frederic V. Hessman <hessman at astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de<mailto:hessman at astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de>> wrote:

Too bad I can’t attend….

Thanks for suggesting a very interesting set of questions!   Sounds more like a 2-day meeting than a lunch break….

IVOA Vocabularies
-----------------

Products and main stakeholders:
- Theory vocabularies (Frank Le Petit / VO Paris)
- Datalink (Markus/Pat / IVOA community)
- IVOAT

I was kind of waiting for the official vocabulary platform to appear before doing anything further, but never heard anything (and was too busy to ask)  - Norman?

It was supposed to contain a distinctly smaller subset of my original IVOAT suggestion, which necessarily means using multiple additonal vocabularies, depending upon what one needs and what was left out - whose?  One can easily purge the old historical stuff from IAU93 and useful things from theory & modelling vocabularies, but the rest?  How does the non-cognoscenti find what’s out there and what one should use?

- UAT (CfA Library, ADS, AAS / Publishing community)
- UCDs (CDS / IVOA community)

e.g. maintenance of UCD’s in SKOS?

- Facilities (Baptiste Cecconi / IVOA Community)

Maintenance and Curation
- no mandates: the curators should use the best/most efficient tools
- best practices: to promote use of the vocabularies, we should recommend:
  - feedback: how feedback from community is incorporated into curation process
  - versioning: how releases are created
  - process: how vocabularies are vetted by the IVOA semantics WG
  - publishing: how machine-readable formats are created and hosted
  - provenance and history: tracking changes over time, preserving history of changes
    - best practices for quoting and using other vocabularies

Publishing
- what is the version of record?
  - current relases on github/institutional repo
  - "blessed" version on IVOA website
- what is the minimal publishing requirement?
  - periodic dumps of SKOS file(s) upon releases
  - HTML landing pages for overall product and items
- where should it be hosted?
  - ivoa.net<http://ivoa.net/> (but under what structure and format)
  - an institutional website (hosted by main curators, endorsed by IVOA)

The IVOA should be a central vocabulary host even if the nominal official copy is somewhere else - simply need to require a minimum of version control and documentation.

Facilities vocabulary
---------------------

Stakeholders and Use cases
- AAS: tag facilities in a machine readable way to facilitate downstream detection
  (via indexing/search)
- CDS: assign facilities
- Planetary community:
- arcsecond.io<http://arcsecond.io/>: is building facilities/instruments list

Requirements/Questions (these influence discovery, access and use):
- level of granularity
- what metadata to include (e.g. long, lat?)
- includes archives?  Services?  Where is the boundary?
- what is its relationship with entries in the registry if any?

Rick


Alasdair J G Gray
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Assistant Professor in Computer Science,
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
(Athena SWAN Bronze Award)
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh UK.

Email: A.J.G.Gray at hw.ac.uk<mailto:A.J.G.Gray at hw.ac.uk>
Web: http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ajg33
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5711-4872
Office: Earl Mountbatten Building 1.39
Twitter: @gray_alasdair










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