Solar vocabularies

From: Frederic V. Hessman <Hessman-at-Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:19:55 +0200


> Since AstroGrid is one of the few groups (only one?) with an active
> solar
> (and STP) contingent, I'll 'volunteer' Elizabeth Auden (supported
> by Silvia
> Dalla) to provide the solar side of the SV. To forestall any
> concerns about this possibly delaying the process, I would think
> the solar terminology will primarily sit on its own tree or major
> branch of other trees. And I think it is important that solar VO
> apps do not fall behind dark-side ones.

This nicely raises a fundamental question about how the WG plans on approaching the selection of SV tokens (assuming that there is a general acceptance of the idea of SOME vocabulary), something that has already appeared slightly different forms in the list: do we simply want a list of all possible interesting words, assuming that the VO clients and apps will simply choose whatever word is appropriate, or do we want to define a vocabular basis of words which users and apps are expected to stick together in some hopefully simple fashion.

Example: do we want to propagate "sunspot" or do we what to propagate "starpot" and expect that the solar types will - somehow - be able to add on some more information that the "starspot" is on the Sun? Nowday, it's amazing how much of early solar terminology is being applied to other stars, so we don't need two or more names for the same thing. This may not be the best example, but one which immediately popped into my head when the Sun was mentioned.

Our original proposal tried to keep the total number of tokens as small as possible by encouraging some form of concatenation (whether trivial ucd-like or fancy OWL-like), a goal I'd like to see kept in the forefront.

Rick



Dr. Frederic V. Hessman     Hessman-at-Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE
Institut für Astrophysik          Tel.  +49-551-39-5052
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http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman


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Received on 2007-09-19Z17:22:18