Threads

At the beginning of the month I started this discussion submitting to the WG a draft on the SV.
The draft is the result of more than 2 years of discussions also with other WG/IGs, when our WG was stills named UCD. The draft offers an answer to the request:

"How can I describe / label my data, if I want to tell the VO what they are about? How can I do it in a standard way, so that the label I am using is understood VO-wide by people and applications?"

The discussion ran along a track that was already explored, and the agreed solution was to extend to astronomical concepts what was already done for astronomical quantities. You can find reference to this solution even in the charter of the WG. The solution was (is) to define standard tokens/atoms/words and to label concepts using these tokens.
One of the reasons for this choice was that concept labels are in most (all?) cases contiguous to quantity labels: e.g.: I publish redshifts of QSOs, or NIR images of spiral galaxies, or fluxes from models of emission nebulae, etc..
So you (human or application) don't need an ad hoc parser to filter-in spiral galaxies: it is the same you already use to filter for redshifts.

Simple was question, simple was the user requirement, simple is the answer: time is money, money is scarce, useless to invent another wheel when we have already one.

Can we do something else with these tokens, beside labelling concepts? Can we perform, say, data mining? Well, yes, at a very basic level. But this was not the request.

I'm one of those working on the Ontology of object types, we are just busy building use-cases. We are perfectly aware that the ultimate goal of intelligent data discovery needs ontologIES. Note the plural. The real breakthrough for users of the VO would be an intelligent guide to find the data they really need and discover other derived data they had not thought of, with the use of ontology-based tools.

This is the right moment for advertising the Practical Semantic Astronomy workshop!

The discussion that is going-on now in the WG forum is basically on ontologies, and is no longer related to the very simple question of more than 2 years ago of what standard label should I put in this registry field or in this parameter of data access protocol XYZ.

We had a user requirement, we have built an answer to that.

Furthermore, we would like to convince people to use ontologies or ontology-related techniques: very good. Let's do it openly: I mean separately. It is a subject too strategically important to be mixed up with a discussion on labelling.

So let's use different threads:

starting with Ontology: for the discussion on Ferrari's, or starting with SV: for the discussion on bicycles.

Have a good ride!
Andrea

Andrea Preite Martinez                 andrea.preitemartinez-at-iasf-roma.inaf.it
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