Rick,
On 2007 Oct 8, at 16:09, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
>> I personally find the revamped token list to be much more
>> palatable (which is obviously why I did it), being nearly human-
>> usable (I don't like to be shouted at by capitalized tokens) and
>> with implicit additional info (e.g. formal names of people and
>> objects).
Doug brought up the issue of how to generate the concept names, as URI fragments. This is a stylistic point, but I think an important one.
I'd like to suggest a rather drastic canonicalisation, so that "He+ ionization zone" would turn into #heionizationzone. This is a pragmatic middle ground between having the concept name mirror the label, and having it fully opaque (such as #concept12345).
Having it consist of only lowercase alpha means (a) we're guaranteed to avoid any parsing troubles, with RDF parsers or with anything else; (b) it's clear to anyone looking at this that they're not supposed to be displaying the concept name, but using the concept's 'Label' and declared relationships instead; while (c) it retains some mnemonic value.
There is a case which can be made for having fully opaque concept names (this is what's done in the Gene Ontology, for example): it's point (b) above, plus it removes any temptation to argue about relationships based on the name alone. Despite that, I think there's value in making it at least partly human-recognisable.
Rick quoting Brian:
>> So, I see 2 different ways to proceed here, either:
>>
> Again, point well taken, but I think we achieve the same thing by
> proposing a new, improved thesaurus which is 98% original while
> ALSO indicating how additional vocabularies (i.e. additional
> namespaces) could be used just as well (e.g. UCD). Then everyone
> can start playing with the new thesaurus for starts, knowing that
> it should cover most of what we need, but also with the intent of
> creating new vocabularies for filling in the many gaps (e.g. I
> started looking at the list of astronomically relevant molecules,
> but then decided this would be a great project for someone else!).
>
> So, I suggest we follow Brian's path #1.5 ("best of both
> worlds"). If we find some librarian somewhere who actually USES
> the old IAU thesaurus - heaven forbid! - we can always produce an
> IVOA-conforming vocabulary document which does the reverse
> translation.
+1
I feel there would be value (if only neatness or completeness) in creating a SKOSified version of the IAU thesaurus as-is, including the errors and deficiencies that have been identified, and at the same time releasing a mildly tidied version, declaring the relevant concepts to be equivalent in almost all cases. That's a <http:// ns.ivoa.net/IAU-1993#> and <http://ns.ivoa.net/IAU-v0.1#>
Norman
-- ------------------------------------------------------------ Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk eurovotech.org : University of Leicester, UKReceived on 2007-10-10Z12:05:15