Re: Who has responsibility for defining units in IVOA (Was: Re: STC and controlled vocab

From: Arnold Rots <arots-at-head.cfa.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 11:54:34 -0400 (EDT)


I agree with Brian and I'm not so sure about other parts, either. The list of the semantics group dealt with things that fall outside the purview of IVOA standards.
A significant part of establishing standards is defining semantics. Semantics that define standards should be, well, defined in those standards, or else the you put the responsibility for all standards on the semantics group.
It may be helpful for the semantics group to refer to the semantics defined in standard documents, but that's a different issue.

So, I'd leave units in DM and coordinate-related stuff in STC...

Brian Thomas wrote:
[ Charset UTF-8 unsupported, converting... ]
> On Thursday 18 May 2006 14:32, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
> > - Units !!!!  Perhaps different from the VO Standard Vocab, but
> >  I think the Semantics group is the right place to standardize
> >  IVOA represenation of unit strings??
>
> Well, youre the chair of the DM group, so you have the power to decide
> to 'not do' something, but..
>
> I would have thought this a DM exercise as systems of units are already
> well quantified, and there is little, to no, slipperiness in the meaning
> of, or definition of the units themselves. Furthermore, the real 'issue'
> in units seems to be which representations to choose, and which
> system(s) are allowed rather than 'what units mean'.
>
> -brian
>
>


Arnold H. Rots                                Chandra X-ray Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots-at-head.cfa.harvard.edu
USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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Received on 2006-05-23Z15:55:43