VocInVO2: Desise change, License

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 12 May 2020, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> Last week, I had threatened two changes to the vocabulary repository,
> and since there was no major outcry, I've gone ahead and implemented
> them, namely:
> 
> On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 11:36:00AM +0200, Markus Demleitner wrote:
> > (1) desise change.  First implementor feedback (thanks, Mark!) was
> > that the terms dictionary in desise could be made more
> > self-documenting by moving the values from lists to dicts.  For
> > [...]
> > So, the proposal is to make this more explicit in this way:
> > 
> >   "terms": {
> >     "EQUATORIAL": {
> >       "label": "Equatorial",
> >       "description": "Umbrella term of all equatorial frame.  Only use for old, pre-FK4 equatorial coordinates."
> >     },
> 
> This is now how the desise in the RDF repo looks like.  This has the

Thanks Markus for that change.

However, now I've got that much I want more...

The current (revised as above) WD has top-level entries including
"terms", "deprecated_terms", "preliminary_terms" and "wider_terms";
the example looks like this:

   {
     "uri": "http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/example",
     "flavour": "RDF Class",
     "terms": {
       "EQUATORIAL": {
         "label": "Equatorial",
         "description": "Umbrella term for all sorts of equatorial frames."
       },
       "ICRS": {
         "label": "ICRS",
         "description": "As defined by 1998AJ....116..516M."
       },
       "B1875.0": {
         "label": "Bonner Durchmusterung System",
         "description": "Deprecated term for the reference system implied by BD/CD"
        },
        "BD": {
         "label": "Bonner Durchmusterung System",
         "description": "The reference system implied by BD/CD"
        },
        "ICRS2": {
         "label": "ICRS 2",
         "description": "The reference system defined by 2027A&A..1234...12B"
        }
     },
     "deprecated_terms": [
       "B1875.0"
     ],
     "preliminary_terms": [
       "ICRS2"
     ],
     "wider_terms": {
       "ICRS": [
         "EQUATORIAL"
       ],
       "ICRS2": [
         "EQUATORIAL"
       ]
     }
   }

I'd like to suggest instead collapsing the deprecated, preliminary
and wider information into the "terms" object, so that it looks
instead like:

   {
     "uri": "http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/example",
     "flavour": "RDF Class",
     "terms": {
       "EQUATORIAL": {
         "label": "Equatorial",
         "description": "Umbrella term for all sorts of equatorial frames."
       },
       "ICRS": {
         "label": "ICRS",
         "description": "As defined by 1998AJ....116..516M.",
         "wider": [ "EQUATORIAL" ]
       },
       "B1875.0": {
         "label": "Bonner Durchmusterung System",
         "description": "Deprecated term for the reference system implied by BD/CD",
         "deprecated": ""
        },
        "BD": {
         "label": "Bonner Durchmusterung System",
         "description": "The reference system implied by BD/CD"
        },
        "ICRS2": {
         "label": "ICRS 2",
         "description": "The reference system defined by 2027A&A..1234...12B",
         "preliminary", ""
         "wider": [ "EQUATORIAL" ]
        }
     },
   }

To me that looks like a more logical and readable way to organise
the information.  The convention for the flag-like attributes
"preliminary" and "description" is that the flag is considered
asserted if its key is present in the term, regardless of the
corresponding value.
A "use_instead" attribute could be added for deprecated terms
as well if required.

Anybody want to agree or disagree that this would be an improvement?

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/