Andrea
Thank you for your effort to restart the injection of ontology and other knowledge engineering into the VO.
I see various ways to extend the UCD concept. For example by extending scope, so that a UCD is not just a "semantic type" of a parameter or table column, but we could make new UCDs for describing service input parameters, types of astronomical object, transitions that can happen to those objects, etc etc. I think namespaces are critical.
There are other projects that are possible: building an ontology, thesaurus, glossary, et etc. But the same malaise seems to strike all the semantics efforts together: there is a great intellectual effort in representing knowledge, but little emphasis on a fundamental question: WHAT ARE HOPING TO ACHIEVE? What is needed is not grand plans for the far future, but rather a small application or demo -- it can be very limited in scope -- so that Jo Astronomer is interested, impressed, and perhaps surprised when she sees it. What is NOT needed -- in my opinion -- is a complicated and formal descriptive apparatus that has no immediate objective or application.
Something that might fit this bill is the Textpresso system (http://www.textpresso.org/). It is made by biologists here at Caltech, and sets out to be a better literature search than Google, at least in its restricted domain. Textpresso builds a knowledge base from automated processing of scientific literature, that can answer quite specific queries about its subfield, in this case genetics of a small worm called C. Elegans. For example "In what cells is the gene eat-4 expressed". The astronomy version might be able to tackle such queries as finding "polarized radio observations of Sharpless 171", and be much better at it than Google.
Roy
California Institute of Technology
626 395 3670
Received on 2005-09-28Z20:10:49