(topic renamed as it is more than just solar terms)
I was heartened to learn from Andrea’s previous post that:
> The point of the draft under discussion is not to include all possible
> astronomical terms in the SV, but to be able to express any possible
> astronomical term, locally defined, in terms of standard SV tokens (or
> words, as we call them in UCD-ish).
and I assumed from this that: a) where astronomers use two or more terms to mean the same thing, we would choose one for the SV, and b) any new concept would only get its own term if it cannot already be conveyed by a combination of existing terms (or until the term becomes commonplace on its own).
The above approach will help in DAL/DM to allow for the labelling of items with the SV ‘normalised’ term and the lookup of the human-worded definition of those terms.
As regards searching however, it will only make easier guided searching, ie that where the user selects (or types if they’ve a good memory) terms from the SV to narrow some search. What it will not do is make easier the type of search where the user simply enters the set of terms that they are used to using in the expectation that the application will understand them.
Is this a problem?
T.
From: owner-semantics-at-eso.org [mailto:owner-semantics-at-eso.org] On Behalf Of
Frederic V. Hessman
Sent: 19 September 2007 16:20
To: semantics-at-ivoa.net
Subject: Solar vocabularies
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 Friedrich-Hund-Platz 1 Fax +49-551-39-5043 37077 Goettingen Room F04-133http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman
http://monet.Uni-Goettingen.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------Received on 2007-09-19Z19:08:27