Format of concatenated UCD's

[Norman Gray]

Rick,

On 2005 Jun 13 , at 15.25, Frederic V. "Rick" Hessman wrote:

> 	<event ucd="em.opt" concept="event.burst"/>
>
> and loose the symantic flexibility of being able to form things like
>
> 	<event description="em.opt;event.burst"/>
>
> (where the fact that the burst happened in the optical is explicit, 
> unlike the previous example).

For what it's worth, I think the second makes a lot more sense (though 
it would be "event.burst;em.opt", since the event in question IsA 
'event.burst' rather than IsA 'em.opt').

Incidentally, this also provides quite a good example of the utility of 
namespaces.  The semi-deprecation of namespaces seems to me to push 
folk toward the non-interoperable workaround illustrated by the first 
of Rick's two alternatives.  Against that, it could be argued that the 
proposed 'event.' hierarchy is doing some of the work of a namespace by 
gathering all the event-related terms together, but that this 
`namespace' is blessed by being standardised.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
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Norman Gray  :  Physics & Astronomy, Glasgow University, UK
http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/  :  www.starlink.ac.uk