Ed, hello.
On 2007 Nov 21, at 17:40, Ed Shaya wrote:
> Norman Gray wrote:
>> 1. The format of the concept labels (case and character set)
I'm not sure I follow you. The maximally normalised format leaves the terms with some mnemonic force for the benefit of that handful of people who will deal with the term URIs directly. Users will never see the URIs, but only the prefLabels, which will be perfectly human- readable.
>> 2. The grammatical number of the concept names (singular or plural)
It now occurs to me that this grammatical number debate is unnecessary.
It doesn't really matter how we name the concepts, because we'll surely use as labels the terms currently in the various vocabularies. That is, the labels in the IAU and A&A vocabularies will be plural because the terms in the IAU thesaurus and the A&A list are plural; the labels for the AOIM vocabulary will be singular because that's what's in the current AOIM list. There's nothing we can do about it, unless we start gratuitously rewriting the existing vocabulary terms, which is very much Not The Point.
>> 3. The number of top concepts in the IAU thesaurus
Indeed. It occurs to me in retrospect that this is also a non- issue. SKOS has a way of declaring the set of top concepts, on the grounds that this _might_ be a way of helping a user visualise or navigate within a vocabulary, if _it so happens_ that a vocabulary ends up roughly hierarchical. However it doesn't mandate it, and there's no obligation to declare top concepts, especially in the case where, as you mention, the analogy is to a book index, which is also a barely-structured list of vocabulary terms.
>> 6. The WD which documents this >>
Ermm, I've heard both Note and WD bandied about; I'm fairly agnostic, though tend to feel we might as well go the whole hog and talk about a standards-track document. We could call it a Note to begin with and potentially decide to standardise it later if that's the feeling of us all.
>> 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. >>
Because it's trivial? Going from the IAU source file to a SKOS file is basically just changing punctuation (plus some technicalities which Alasdair, Rick and Doug can surely talk about at length!).
What do folk think of the timetable?
All the best,
Norman
-- ------------------------------------------------------------ Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk eurovotech.org : University of Leicester, UKReceived on 2007-11-21Z22:19:28