Dear Andrea and Sebastien
This note is to ask the UCD working group for help in building a new section of the UCD vocabulary in support of the VOEvent working group.
The first meeting of the VOEvent WG was last week in Pasadena, with the objective of describing "immediate astronomical events" in a semantically-meaningful way. One of the parts of that schema is parameters that say what was observed, and another part is a "hypothesis" of what astrophysics may be behind the event. As an example, what was observed could be a "mag 17 source in galaxy X that was not there last week", and the hypothesis could be "supernova".
We would like the "hypothesis" section to be based on a standard vocabulary, so that people can select and query based on these words. In other words, we would like a UCD section covering astronomical event types. Could you help us with doing this? Perhaps a meeting at the Kyoto IVOA would be appropriate? I cannot be there, but Arnold Rots and Alasdair Allen could speak for VOEvent.
In the meeting last week, we came up with the words below as a start. It is in two parts -- the astrophysical objects, and the actual events that relate to the objects.
Roy Williams
California Institute of Technology
626 395 3670
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