Question - History of ivoa onto of astronomical object types

[Francoise Genova]

To my knowledge most of the original authors are still on the list. They 
can contact you if they wish.

Best regards
Francoise

Le 06/12/2021 à 23:34, Robert Rovetto a écrit :
> I understand, thanks. Very nice points, reiterating the value of 
> different knowledge organizations systems and approaches.
>
> I'm wondering a couple of things:
> - Does anyone on the list have interest in ontological aspects for the 
> current vocabularies?
> - Or more generally, anyone have interest in pursuing other 
> ontological aspects?
> - Or more specifically, anyone have interest in further developing the 
> ivoa astornomy ontology 
> <https://www.ivoa.net/documents/Notes/AstrObjectOntology/20100117/NOTE-AstrObjectOntology-1.3-20100117.html>?
>
> You mentioned the original authors. Does anyone have their latest 
> contact information? Or if anyone is willing to put me in touch, 
> please let me know. (I've not found a couple of them)
>
> On Monday, December 6, 2021, 03:28:44 AM EST, Markus Demleitner 
> <msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
>
>
> Robert,
>
> On Sat, Dec 04, 2021 at 07:21:48AM +0000, Robert Rovetto wrote:
> > Does anyone know:- why it did not reach an application stage?
> > - why the study or further work did not continue?
> > - Did the ivoa ontology exploration proved to be insufficient,
> > partly so, or otherwise (and why)?
> > - What caused the current effort (the current IVOA vocabularies),
> > rather than continuing with the ontology or a set of ontologies?
>
> At least on this last question I can give my personal view.
>
> Historically, much earlier than the object types came various efforts
> to produce a thesaurus in astronomy, and the original activities of
> the semantics WG had a significant focus there.  This significantly
> informed Vocabularies version 1
> (http://ivoa.net/Documents/cover/Vocabularies-20091007.html),
> published in 2009 and essentially only dealing with SKOS.
>
> Vocabularies 1 did not (and Vocabularies 2 does not) claim to lock
> down the applications for semantic technologies to whatever it lists,
> and thus when for Datalink's semantics column (WD from 2013:
> http://ivoa.net/documents/DataLink/20131022/) properties were more
> appropriate than SKOS' rather loose concepts, and we wanted
> "naturally" transitive relationships, we went for RDFS instead.
>
> Further applications of this formalism came up, first in
> VOResource 1.1 (most importantly, relationships between VO resources;
> think "data collections and services giving access to them"),
> replacing flat word lists in XML schema files.  But we found that the
> somewhat matter-of-factly "here's some RDF" that was introduced with
> the datalink vocabulary left a few things to be desired.
>
> First, client authors needed guidance on how to consume the semantic
> resources.  And we needed clear rules for how to add terms to the
> vocabularies.  There had been several requests for amending the
> datalink vocabulary since something like 2014, and nobody was really
> sure who should deal with them, and how.  Well: that is how
> Vocabularies 2 came to happen.
>
> As to the question on why there is not a single ontology: Well, I
> frankly do not see a use case where it would help having concepts
> from datalink ("what sort of information does this link give on
> dataset?") together with reference frames ("what sort of celestial or
> perhaps planetary grid was used?") together with messenger types
> ("what sort of particle communicated the signal reported here?").
>
> On the other hand, keeping them separate makes a few things quite a
> bit simpler, for instance, because the resources often are trivially
> compact (just a few kilobytes), and because a standard can say
> relatively simple things like "the refposition attribute takes its
> values from the identifiers of the
> http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/refposition 
> <http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/refposition >IVOA vocabulary"; in a unified
> ontology, this would, for all I can see, take quite a bit more effort
> overall, in particular as regards simple presentation accessible to
> plain web browsers.
>
> Does this help a bit?
>
>
>         -- Markus


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