Greetings - interest in semantic modeling and ontology

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Roberto,

On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 02:53:37AM +0000, Robert Rovetto wrote:
> I hope 2021 is good well and safe for you. I've attended meetings
> before. Will there be another in the near future?

We will have a telecon in early March, which is going to be announced
on this mailing list soon.  And, of course, there will be the northern
spring Interop in May.  Again, the announcement should be out soon,
and it will be distributed to the subscribers of this list, too.

> One of my focus areas is conceptual modeling and ontology for
> astronautics and astronomy.  I'm interested in the ontology of
> astronomical object types, but didn't hear discussion of it in
> prior meetings.  Has that project completed? Or is there ongoing
> work (And if so, how to contribute). 

There has been significant activity to create a full ontology of
object types about a decade ago
(https://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/AstrObjectOntology/), but there
hasn't been much follow-up to that, for instance as regards takeup in
SSAP or Obscore (target_class).

On the other hand, Simbad has had a fairly elaborate systematics of
object types for a long time, and its hierarchy is widely used, even
from within TAP
(http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-display?data=otypes).

And then most of these concepts are present in the UAT, too
(http://astrothesaurus.org).

I personally would like to see a strictly tree-like IVOA vocabulary,
presumably with links to both the UAT and the existing simbad
classification, but that's inspired mainly by use cases in Obscore
and SSAP in conjunction with Simabad.

There have been coffee-break discussions about this in Groningen (the
fall 2019 interop), but that's been about it so far, perhaps because
there haven't been Interop coffee breaks since then.

As to contributions (which are of course most gratefully accepted) --
my most immediate interest would be your use cases.  Before saying
anything else I'd like to wait until after the telecon ("Semantics
Calls 3") – to which you are of course cordially invited.

Thanks,

            Markus