Registration opening for May 2009 IVOA Interop meeting

[Norman Gray]

On 2009 Mar 10, at 18:37, Rob Seaman wrote:

> I was under the impression that the vocabulary infrastructure was  
> ready for adoption.

More or less, yes.  We do not expect the IVOA Vocabularies document to  
change significantly now.  However, we are now waiting on the SKOS  
document (on which we have a normative dependency) to become a W3C  
REC, which is now expected around the end of June 2009 [1].  Prior to  
that, the Vocabularies document is currently in its RFC period, and  
awaiting input from, for example, the two TCG members of the VOEvent  
WG (ahem).

The only change likely to be relevant to the Vocabularies document is  
that the URL for the SKOS namespace will change.  However, that will  
not affect the namespace of the terms in the vocabularies distributed  
as part of the IVOA document, which can I think be used as of now.

> This effort can proceed independent of VOEvent v2.0.  All we need to  
> discuss for the standard is the question of how we want to use  
> controlled vocabularies of whatever sort.  If we can just pin down  
> the details of the XML plumbing, ...

Choose between:

<Why>
<concept>http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/Vocabularies/AAkeys#StarsSupernovaeGeneral 
</concept>
<concept>http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/Vocabularies/IAUT93#Supernovas</ 
concept>
</Why>

or

<Why>
<concept term='http://...'/>
<concept term='http://...'/>
</Why>

If you want to let this contain free text as well, then you could  
permit free-text keywords in the element content, and vocabulary terms  
in a reserved attribute.

> How do I say, "this is a supernova type Ia"?  What sorts of semantic  
> assertions are required or desirable for VOEvent packets?  How are  
> these represented?  (Somebody say something quick before Roy tells  
> us to stuff it into a Param!)

Those terms above are the most specific ones I could find in the A&A  
and IAU93 thesauri.

If you want more specific terms, you can develop a thesaurus yourself,  
and make broaderMatch links to these terms.

I've been in touch with Rick (and Franck Le Petit and Matthew) about  
hosting the collaborative development of such a thesaurus, which is  
only waiting on a surfeit of free time (or someone's PhD student) to  
bring that hosting about.

I also have an MSc student working on sprucing up the vocabulary  
mapping editor that Alasdair Gray prototyped last year.

See!  No params in sight!

All the best,

Norman


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2009Mar/0003.html

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
Dept Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester