semantics: Re: Vocab AND Ontology?

From: Frederic V. Hessman <Hessman-at-Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 12:13:40 +0200

Just in case you have been wondering whether the Vocab/ontology discussion has petered out, here's my contribution to a concrete proposal. Following Norman's re-formatting of the A&A and AOIM vocabularies into SKOS, a completely re-furbished version of the IAU thesaurus can be perused at

http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE/~hessman/rdf

including

a totally reworked, tentatively normative text file, including corrections, considerable reduction in the number of tokens (via aliases), re-writing the original upper case tokens in useable format (including capitalization of names, correct use of hyphens);
a SKOS file containing the thesaurus (should be formally useable); and
simple HTML documentation (token list, alias list, dictionary with comments about major revisions) to make perusal of the contents more bearable.

Yes, the IAU thesaurus is larger than we'd prefer and contains lots of historical baggage (no, we don't need a token for Ramsden eyepieces), but it's there, is official, was "easily" extended to include more modern concepts (e.g. Type Ia supernovae weren't quite as important in the 80's and so were left out!) and could just as easily be extended to cover the other things needed by, e.g., VOEvent.

I'm sure we could agree on a better text format to conform to standard ontology usage, but everything should be self-explanatory.

Enjoy!

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 F04-133

http://www.Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.de/~hessman

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Received on 2007-10-04Z12:14:06