New UCDs for VOEvent please

[Ed Shaya]

Rob Seaman wrote:

> On Apr 27, 2005, at 9:16 AM, Matthew Graham wrote:
>
>> One alternative, though I do not know how practically viable it would 
>> be at present, is to use the astronomy ontology that Ed Shaya at 
>> University of Maryland is developing and presented a poster about at 
>> last year's ADASS.
>
>
> I didn't want to muddy the waters by bringing up the "O" word.  Google 
> "Shaya astronomy ontology" for lots of hits on this.  

My!  I took this advice and googled on "ontology shaya" and found the 
following information:

*C.  Paths to Enlightenment: Buddhist Art in India and Java*

*The Life and Teachings of the Buddha (ca. 563-483):*

Prince Siddhartha, surname Gautama, son of Queen Maya and King 
Suddhodana, born in the small kingdom of Kapilavastu near the Nepalese 
border.  Known as Shakyamuni ("Sage of the Shaya Clan").  Nirvana, 
Parinirvana at Kusignagara.  Formation of the Sangha or Order of Monks

What this says is that an alias name for Buddha/Siddhartha is "Sage of 
the Shaya Clan".
It logically follows that Ontology is part of the eightfold path to 
enlightenment or possibly the ninth fold.

> My visceral reaction to discussions over the last couple of years as 
> well as the last couple of days is similar.  A noble effort - so large 
> and grand that pragmatic functioning systems can't possibly rely on 
> the results in any strong sense.  I also have a deep skepticism that 
> practicing astronomers will embrace the results.  Noble nonetheless 
> and worthy of the best efforts that the VO can spare.
>
> On the other hand, VOEvent will amount to nothing if it is not 
> rigorously pragmatic.  I don't think that "pragmatic" and "ontology" 
> are incompatible - and VOEvent provides a great test case for 
> demonstrating this.  We need to describe only certain astronomical 
> processes/objects - the ones with a time varying nature.  Our list 
> should be biased by an artful sense of where the productive science 
> lies - start with shadings of GRBs, SNs, solar system objects - and 
> some variations on grab bag categories of "other" or "none of the 
> above" or even "all of the above".  Establish a process for adding to 
> the list.  And don't get too torqued up about "technical correctness".

With th end of the NVO NSF grant within 18 months, it certainly makes 
sense to find the quickest and simplest set of terms to fashion into a 
message for VOEvent alerting.  Afterall, we just want to say an event 
happened at such a time and it appears to be one of these things.  And 
it appears that it is almost finished except for a few details and 
agreement to standards.

But we can also be keeping another eye on the longer time scale where we 
want to be able to put data in machine understandable terms so that 
applications can do the most possible on our behalf.  This requires 
something a bit more sophisticated than just a simple class hierarchy of 
terms.  An ontology would be more complete but probably not even an 
order of magnitude (factor 10) more than the UCD is now.  In fact, given 
the requests and requirements to augment UCDs,  with time, the UCD will 
probably grow to the size of an ontology anyway.   So, it is probably 
wise to start doing some thinking in terms of the formal OWL standard now. 
What we do with the ontology can vary greatly.
1.  Use it as a string identifier, exactly as UCDs are.  The advantage 
is that one can read the Ontology at that point to get more context for 
the meaning of the term.
2.  Use it as one more model builder for developing schemas.  This is 
like UML but more in tune with knowledge/information structures.  I 
think this is what Mathew had in mind.
3. Use it to test completeness and consistency of terms.  This would not 
be on the fly, but rather as one adds new terms one can see whether it 
is clashing with other terms and Venn diagrams let you see something 
about completeness.  This then makes it more acceptable for groups to be 
adding terms into their namespace without going to the VO heads or the IAU.
4. One can use it as the defining structure of all information being 
exchanged.  Sounds daring but in fact several other related science 
fields are preparing to do just that, including space physics.
5. One can use it to reason out pathways to converting, pipelining, and 
analysing data.  It should be possible to automatically find the 
transformation and queries needed to satisfy an arbitrary  stated goal 
or request.   Our group at UMD has an NASA/AISRP grant to figure out the 
basics of how this might be done using OWL.

Ed

> Rob Seaman
> NOAO
>
>