Re: Vocab format

On Friday 14 September 2007 4:38:09 pm Tony Linde wrote:
> No, broader and narrower are relationships: so you would record the relationship that SeyfertGalaxy
> is a narrowing of the term, Galaxy. Certainly we would want to record both terms, but do we want to
> record the realtionships? And, to start with, I'd say no. The above relationship is probably a safe bet
> but many (and I'm thinking of perhaps cosmology -> cosmicBackground) are less certain or more
> problematic, so would reckon that we skip all relationships at the beginning.

	Sure, I agree. The adding of properties (which would include the relationships between the terms)
	should wait. It is, afterall, supposed to be a simple dictionary, and moving in this fashion 
	has be bonus that you will also limit the arguments about how things might be related. 

>
> We might even, later, decide that we'd rather use OWL or similar to record relationships rather than SKOS.

	Sure, I'd agree to that as well. Given the contentiousness of the various members of the IVOA in
	general, I'd bet that any 'overarching' ontology which expresses the relationships (properties) of
	the vocabulary terms is going to be quite simple and slowly evolving (perhaps that is a good thing). 

	From my point of view, specialists and sub-groups (like, say VOEvent) who demand more than the
	vanilla dictionary, will, and should, develop their own ontologies which extend off the base IVOA 
	dictionary and provide the additional relationships they need. Much later, a group may come back
	to try to glean common relationships into a more general ontology (maybe...or perhaps by that point
	there will be software which will aid in this difficult task)

	=brian