<html><head></head><body><div class="ydpcec7b564yahoo-style-wrap" style="font-family:Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;"><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">I understand, thanks. Very nice points, reiterating the value of different knowledge organizations systems and approaches. <br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">I'm wondering a couple of things:<br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">- Does anyone on the list have interest in ontological aspects for the current vocabularies? <br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><div>- Or more generally, anyone have interest in pursuing other ontological aspects?<br><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><span>- Or more specifically, </span>anyone have interest in further developing the <a href="https://www.ivoa.net/documents/Notes/AstrObjectOntology/20100117/NOTE-AstrObjectOntology-1.3-20100117.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ivoa astornomy ontology</a>?</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><span><br></span></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><span>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)</span><br></div></div></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div></div><div id="yahoo_quoted_9483813041" class="yahoo_quoted">
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On Monday, December 6, 2021, 03:28:44 AM EST, Markus Demleitner <msdemlei@ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
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<div>Robert,<br clear="none"><br clear="none">On Sat, Dec 04, 2021 at 07:21:48AM +0000, Robert Rovetto wrote:<br clear="none">> Does anyone know:- why it did not reach an application stage?<br clear="none">> - why the study or further work did not continue? <br clear="none">> - Did the ivoa ontology exploration proved to be insufficient,<br clear="none">> partly so, or otherwise (and why)?<br clear="none">> - What caused the current effort (the current IVOA vocabularies),<br clear="none">> rather than continuing with the ontology or a set of ontologies?<br clear="none"><br clear="none">At least on this last question I can give my personal view.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Historically, much earlier than the object types came various efforts<br clear="none">to produce a thesaurus in astronomy, and the original activities of<br clear="none">the semantics WG had a significant focus there. This significantly<br clear="none">informed Vocabularies version 1<br clear="none">(<a shape="rect" href="http://ivoa.net/Documents/cover/Vocabularies-20091007.html" target="_blank">http://ivoa.net/Documents/cover/Vocabularies-20091007.html</a>),<br clear="none">published in 2009 and essentially only dealing with SKOS.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Vocabularies 1 did not (and Vocabularies 2 does not) claim to lock<br clear="none">down the applications for semantic technologies to whatever it lists,<br clear="none">and thus when for Datalink's semantics column (WD from 2013:<br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="http://ivoa.net/documents/DataLink/20131022/" target="_blank">http://ivoa.net/documents/DataLink/20131022/</a>) properties were more<br clear="none">appropriate than SKOS' rather loose concepts, and we wanted<br clear="none">"naturally" transitive relationships, we went for RDFS instead.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Further applications of this formalism came up, first in<br clear="none">VOResource 1.1 (most importantly, relationships between VO resources;<br clear="none">think "data collections and services giving access to them"),<br clear="none">replacing flat word lists in XML schema files. But we found that the<br clear="none">somewhat matter-of-factly "here's some RDF" that was introduced with<br clear="none">the datalink vocabulary left a few things to be desired.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">First, client authors needed guidance on how to consume the semantic<br clear="none">resources. And we needed clear rules for how to add terms to the<br clear="none">vocabularies. There had been several requests for amending the<br clear="none">datalink vocabulary since something like 2014, and nobody was really<br clear="none">sure who should deal with them, and how. Well: that is how<br clear="none">Vocabularies 2 came to happen.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">As to the question on why there is not a single ontology: Well, I<br clear="none">frankly do not see a use case where it would help having concepts<br clear="none">from datalink ("what sort of information does this link give on<br clear="none">dataset?") together with reference frames ("what sort of celestial or<br clear="none">perhaps planetary grid was used?") together with messenger types<br clear="none">("what sort of particle communicated the signal reported here?").<br clear="none"><br clear="none">On the other hand, keeping them separate makes a few things quite a<br clear="none">bit simpler, for instance, because the resources often are trivially<br clear="none">compact (just a few kilobytes), and because a standard can say<br clear="none">relatively simple things like "the refposition attribute takes its<br clear="none">values from the identifiers of the<br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/refposition " target="_blank">http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/refposition </a>IVOA vocabulary"; in a unified<br clear="none">ontology, this would, for all I can see, take quite a bit more effort<br clear="none">overall, in particular as regards simple presentation accessible to<br clear="none">plain web browsers.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Does this help a bit?<div class="yqt9762525247" id="yqtfd63920"><br clear="none"><br clear="none"> -- Markus<br clear="none"></div></div>
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