On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Tony Linde wrote:
> It has been suggested that the need for the SV is obvious and pressing. Is
> it? What for? Maybe people could reply to this with their own views.
One of the original motivations for the SV came from DAL/DM: we have a need to describe the type of astronomical object observed (Target.Class), or search for data for a particular class of object (TargetClass input parameter) and found that, while some partial compilations of this type had been created within astronomy, there was nothing comprehensive.
As a starting point it would be good to have such a list so that data publishers can assign a standard classification to an object when an observation is published, rather than just make one up as we do currently (this does not require infererence, just a good well thought out and comprehensive classification system). Later, once we have this, is will also be desirable to be able to map less well-formed user inputs for astronomical object types to the SV in a portal, so that we can use this for data discovery (this could benefit from inference capabilities).
I imagine VOEvent (at least) has a very similar problem.