Greetings, all.
I've been somewhat detached from the vocabularies discussion for the last couple of weeks (hassle on another project). I'd quite like to move this forward, though,with a view to getting some initial draft out by the end of the calendar year.
The outstanding issues appear to be:
*. Any others?
My responses to these are below, but I think the most important one is [7]
7. How we manage the development and release of the vocabularies
We currently seem to have at least three sets of vocabulary SKOS files, namely Rick's, Alasdair's and Doug's (my offerings have been absorbed into Alasdair's), and we have an outline WD in my repository -- we should perhaps start to share this stuff, and look towards making at least a first release of all this before the end of this calendar year.
We could look at some distributed VC system such as Git, or less fun but more practically share it via SourceForge or Google Code (ie, repository plus issue tracking). If you all are agreeable, I'll set up a project in one of the latter and start importing. Shout now.
That project's repository would be the working copy of the various vocabularies, making releases to the IVOA standards process, which would be the formal master. There is an issue about the format of the master source -- namely SKOS as a master, some other private format which is reprocessed into SKOS, or something like the Lexicon source file used for the IAU thesaurus; there have been various views on that which we can resolve fairly shortly as a technicality.
Timescales: How about this?
30 Nov: shared project set up and populated with at least WD text
7 Dec: some SKOS-generating code in the repository, and a set of
technical issues/disagreements identified
19 Dec: loose agreement on technical issues, and a first version
of a WD document with normative SKOS appendices released to the IVOA
documents process from the shared repository
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I'd vote for Rick's option 2, bareboneslowercasenames, but we can possibly argue about that more constructively during step 2 above.
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2. The grammatical number of the concept names (singular or plural)
It seems that english-language thesauri `traditionally' have concepts labelled with plurals, whereas French and German ones typically have concepts labelled with singular terms. That's according to ISO-5964. I don't think it's a big deal, but the examples in the SKOS docs are indeed either abstract nouns or plurals.
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3. The number of top concepts in the IAU thesaurus
The plenitude of top concepts does seem odd, I agree, but I don't think it's necessarily a problem. There's nothing really magical about a tree, and this is supposed to be a controlled vocabulary rather than a systemisation-of-all-knowledge
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4. The number of vocabularies we intend to produce (in particular whether we produce a pair of `IAU' thesauri, including a corrected and updated one, and which UCD vocabulary we use), and which interrelationships we plan to publish
I'd suggest one each for A&A, AOIM, UCD, IAU original and possibly IAU updated. That is, we publish a SKOSified version of the _original_ IAU thesaurus, with all its spelling mistakes and outdatedness, and don't touch that thereafter. Subsequently or simultaneously we could and should publish a preened and updated one, with whatever IAU imprimaturs Rob or others can bring upon us.
The interrelationships are vital, I think, but they should not be included in the SKOS files for the various vocabularies, but as separate items in the standard document set. They can be produced and maintained on a separate timescale.
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5. Which namespace we use
The options I can see are
I think I prefer the second (though I wouldn't go to the stake about it). For what it's worth, I think this is compatible with the W3C's practice.
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6. The WD which documents this
My fault: I'm late producing this, after having said at the October VO-TECH meeting that it would take very little time.
I anticipate a fairly thin document, documenting the decision to use SKOS and describing what's available, along with some relatively small quantity of high-level rationale for the decisions taken, and acting as a placeholder and namespace for the normative SKOS files attached to it. Authorship would be whoever contributes text or SKOS stuff.
How does all this sound?
All the best,
Norman
--Received on 2007-11-21Z11:18:55
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Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk eurovotech.org : University of Leicester, UK