Data Source vocabulary

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear colleagues,

On Tue, Jun 09, 2026 at 12:22:06PM +0200, Hervé WOZNIAK via semantics wrote:
> I guess, this is a bit different from the proposal. But both are, in fact,
> 'mock' observations. So, I don't see the need for both definition, 'mock'
> being enough imho.
>
> Btw, I agree that 'Theory' has been permanently misleading in IVOA context

At least this is something almost everyone agrees with :-)

Let me again appeal to everyone to be not *tooo* hung up on term
identifiers.  Labels, and most importantly definitions, are what
really counts, although of course good identifiers can avoid
confusion.

In private mail, Gregory and Vandana have made a nice point for the
distinction between what's Artificial and Simulation in SSAP: Do we
talk about this universe or some/any other universe.  This, at the end,
leads to the pragmatic difference whether I can, to put it
graphically, meaningfully blink the simulation result and a definite,
predictable observation in the current universe.

This leads to the following nice concept map:

  instrument\what     this universe        any universe

  computer            concrete-model       abstract-model

  other instrument    observation          N/A

-- I like the N/A because there is no way to look at "any universe"
with some sort of camera, spectrograph or whatever.

The concept identifiers in that map are from another attempt I've
made at the data-source vocabulary
<http://localhost/rdf/data-source>.  The definitions have changed
only very little (which is a good sign to me), but I've changed
labels and identifiers (in slightly different directions, mainly to
demonstrate that that's a thing we can do) with the goal of
reflecting the Interop discussions (at least as far as expressions of
dislike are concerned:-).

If someone wants to make a strong point that the distinction between
this vs. any universe shouldn't be reflected here, please do that
now.

If you think it is plausible that we will want to split up
observations into, say, pointed and survey (SSAP used to do that) one
level down any time soon, please speak up, too; it's always a bit
clumsy if hierarchy enters this kind of thing when it's already in
use.

If you feel that the identifiers and labels should be somewhat
different, I'm grateful for suggestions; if you agree with some
suggestion, incidentally, this is a good opportunity for sending the
occasional +1 mail.

Thanks,

           Markus