Re: New issue?: vocabulary maintenance

From: Frederic V. Hessman <Hessman-at-Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 14:06:39 +0100

On 6 Feb 2008, at 12:29 pm, Alasdair Gray wrote:

>>> Presuming that we'll be wanting to add mappings between these  
>>> vocabularies (that being half the point of this project), this is  
>>> starting to look like a lot of work. Perhaps A&A, IVOAT and AOIM  
>>> would be an adequately large set to include in the standard after  
>>> all.
>>>
>> No, I'd say we should include mappings between A&A and AIOM simply  
>> to show that it can be done.   Leave the rest for the question of  
>> what vocabulary is going to be the best lingua franca.  It's  
>> tempting to use IAU-93, but there are simply too many mistakes and  
>> things missing and we can't/shouldn't correct for this.

> The big problem with the IAU-93 is that there are no definitions for
> the terms. This is another reason we need to get the IVOAT, or at
> least an early version of it, ready for use. However, there will
> ultimately be the need for mappings between pairs of vocabularies as
> it may not always be possible to express these by going through a
> central vocabulary.

Strictly speaking, 99% of the "definitions" in the present IVOAT are simply human-readable versions of the token names. The few exceptions are mostly new entries like the atomic elements (e.g. "actinium" has the description "actinium (atomic number 89)") or a few where the meaning needed to be more precise or isn't commonly known (e.g. BaileyType). Thus, one could create minimal descriptions also for the IAU-93 thesaurus by simply de-capitalizing. I did this for the IVOAT, but I admit it took a bit more than just running a python script over it to get it right.

Rick Received on 2008-02-06Z14:06:56