Marco C. Leoni wrote:
> The Note can be found here: http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/UCDmaintenance.html
>
> Cheers,
> Marco
>
>
In addition to the procedure for approving changes, I'd suggest one needs to be clearer about the nature of the change that is being contemplated.
Here are some of the kinds of changes I can imagine:
Deletion: The UCD word is to be removed from the list of standard UCDs.
Normally a deletion request should include a statement of what
UCD would be used in place of the original UCD.
A list of deleted UCDs (e.g., all of UCD1) and their replacements
should be maintained. Another example here might be the FITS 'EPOCH'
keyword which was originally misdefined and is now deprecated and
replaced by EQUINOX. There is a pending request to replace
UCDs for mean and variance with the moments of various orders.
Modification: The role of the UCD word is being changed (preferably expanded
so that existing uses of the word are not made invalid). E.g., this
might come up when a concept is originally split into too fine granularity
and it's decided that in the future only one of a set of original UCD's
should be used.
Amendment: The description of the UCD is to be corrected, but its intended usage
is not changed.
Addition: A new UCD word to be added. This is what most of the fuss has been about.
In addition to the general description, I believe that there needs to be
some very specific roles about how this word can be combined with other words.
Can it be a primary word or is it primarily intended as a modifier?
This last point leads to the issue that so far we have discussed the maintenance of the vocabulary only at the level of UCD words. Some management of the use of atoms and maintained guidelines on how given words can be combined into UCDs are probably also needed. E.g., I'd suggest that re-use of atom strings be forbidden or at least be strongly discouraged.
A little nit ...
Looking at the proposed UCDs I'd like to ask that some standard on the capitalization of UCDs be promulgated. There are suggestions for
pos.htm (as the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh index) and
phys.IMF (as the Initial Mass Function)
Personally I would prefer lower case in both of these, but so long as it's consistent
I don't care much.
Tom McGlynn Received on 2005-10-19Z14:10:39