Vocabularies Release 0.90; WD 1.0 imminent

Rick and Andrea, hello.

On 2008 Feb 14, at 09:20, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:

>> UCD is widely used in the VO and represents the most important  
>> current vocabulary to which many other vocabularies are going to  
>> want to link.  For this reason alone, there MUST be a SKOS version.

No objection from me. If you can think of some use-case text that could sit alongside the list in <http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ivoa/vocabularies/vocabularies-0.90.xhtml#usecases  >, then the document would surely be improved.

> However, Norman points out correctly, that this version must be
> maintained, and the only real option is that the UCD working group
> do it.

Andrea:

> I agree. As chairman of the UCD-sci group, in charge of the
> maintenance of the UCD list, I think that this group can take the
> charge of maintaining both the unformatted plain list AND the
> skosified one

Sounds good.

> I interpreted your enthusiasm as a helpful and needed impetus to get
> on with the process of providing a basis-vocabulary soon after the
> proposal is accepted.

No problem -- I suppose it retrospectively illustrates the value of a clearly articulated issues list!

> FIVE, since A&A, AOIM, UCD1, IAU-93 and constellations will be
> finished and immediately useable. IVOAT should be mentioned, but
> as work-in-progress and hence different.

I suppose that, depending on the precise timing, it might be worth including a snapshot in the Vocabularies standard, but I'll leave that up to you when we get to PR stage.

> Obviously, A&A should be ultimately maintained by A&A, AOIM by the
> informal outreach group, UCD by the UCD working group, and the
> document should make this very clear.

I've added a little text which might clarify this.

> We should be able to get IAU-93 into a form which represents ALL of
> the Shobrook&Shobrook content, in which case the vocabulary is - by
> definition - normative and finished. Should we find some minor
> errors, I'm sure we can find someone to make sure it's corrected,
> well-documented, and put back into the IVOA's (still unknown!!!)
> vocabulary collection.

Alasdair added the IAU-93 vocabulary to the collection in the repository, and he and I have adjusted the SKOSification a little since then, but it'll be distributed without semantic changes.

Andrea:

> I think the issue on maintenance is closed.

Agreed, and I've updated the issues list accordingly.

> Coming to the draft, I think we are now too cautious in setting the
> version
> to .04, as we were too optimistics calling the very first version
> 1.0 !!!
> It is time to officially present to the WG the Vocabularies document
> as
> WD v1.0
> Do you agree? If so, I'll send an edited v1.0 to the doc repository.

I've released a 0.90 (with a big minor-version-number hike which will please Rob!). I can't upload it to the wiki because www.ivoa.net seems to be ignoring me. I'll keep trying, though.

There are still a few yellow-marked TODOs in there, but they can be resolved during the WD process.

So if all the editors are happy, and if no-one else shouts very promptly, I'll make a 1.0 release and hand the tarball over to Andrea for upload.

All the best,

Norman

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester