From andrea.preitemartinez at rm.iasf.cnr.it Wed Sep 28 08:05:02 2005 From: andrea.preitemartinez at rm.iasf.cnr.it (Andrea Preite Martinez) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:05:02 +0200 Subject: Call for contributions Message-ID: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> (This message is sent to the UCD and UCD-sci lists: I?m sorry, some of you will receive it twice!) Dear All, The InterOp meeting is approaching, and there is still ample room for contribution in the Agenda of the UCD session. For the moment I envisage to shortly describe the current status of UCDs and open a discussion on future perspectives. Between the present situation and the future development of ontology, I think there is the need for an intermediate step. Up to now, with the "first generation" UCDs, we tackled the problem of describing mainly "quantities" appearing in table data, with the addition of various flavours of qualifiers and modifiers. On the other hand there is an increasing need to describe other concepts within a semantic scheme unique and agreed upon by the whole community. Elements of data models or object types and phenomena of "events" are typical examples of what we might want to integrate in a "second generation" UCDs. We should keep in mind that we need to go any way through this intermediate step in order to build the ontology. By the way, this is the reason why we asked in Kyoto to add "semantics" to the name of the working group. I think it is time to discuss how to build the second generation of UCDs. Some of you already proposed ucd-words of this kind during the recent discussion on the ucd vocabulary. Next UCD session is the right place to restart the discussion. If you want to contribute, send me a title and the time required in order to update the agenda of the session. Andrea ============================================================================== Andrea Preite Martinez andrea.preitemartinez at rm.iasf.cnr.it Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale Tel.:+39.06.4993.4641 Area di Ricerca di Tor Vergata Fax.:+39.06.2066.0188 Via del Fosso del Cavaliere 100 Cell:+39.339.3817355 00133 Roma CDS :+33.3.90242473 ============================================================================== From seaman at noao.edu Wed Sep 28 09:42:04 2005 From: seaman at noao.edu (Rob Seaman) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 09:42:04 -0700 Subject: Call for contributions In-Reply-To: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> References: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> Message-ID: On Sep 28, 2005, at 8:05 AM, Andrea Preite Martinez wrote: > Elements of data models or object types and phenomena of "events" > are typical examples of what we might want to integrate in a > "second generation" UCDs. Yes, indeed. I think we can all reach agreement on such things. > On the other hand there is an increasing need to describe other > concepts within a semantic scheme unique and agreed upon by the > whole community. No, not at all. A single, unique UCD namespace will never satisfy all requirements and all users. The current UCD effort has produced a worthy product. The way to protect the investment in the current UCDs, as well as to support the development of new classes of UCDs, is to recognize just that - that "VOConcepts" and other future DM specific UCDs represent separate classes of UCDs - separate namespaces. UCDs are not XML, but the concept of a purpose specific namespace is larger than either. We cannot possibly afford to wait for agreement from the whole community for every single UCD that is proposed. The solution is to recognize that UCDs live in multiple lists managed by multiple authorities, i.e., they live in namespaces (whether or not we call them that). And bear in mind that as the VO matures, the community in question will become the larger astronomy and physics (and geoscience and planetary science and exobiology and...) community, not just the current cozy coffee klatch. Terminology will inevitably collide. We should allow for that now, rather than address each name collision as some ad hoc shoehorning of concepts into nomenclature that fits badly or not at all. > We should keep in mind that we need to go any way through this > intermediate step in order to build the ontology. Yes and no. Yes this is the correct path to follow. No, I am skeptical that a single universe-girdling ontology will emerge at the end of the day. If the VO semantic efforts fail, it will be due to over-reaching and over-generalization. We need to define a process for building separate, project and purpose specific, ontologies (plural). Rob Seaman NOAO -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From roy at cacr.caltech.edu Wed Sep 28 11:10:19 2005 From: roy at cacr.caltech.edu (Roy Williams) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:10:19 -0700 Subject: Call for contributions In-Reply-To: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> References: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> Message-ID: <7c91e618ae1dd30e11790017baf3f7d1@cacr.caltech.edu> 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 From eca at mssl.ucl.ac.uk Wed Sep 28 11:21:06 2005 From: eca at mssl.ucl.ac.uk (Elizabeth Auden) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 19:21:06 +0100 (BST) Subject: Call for contributions In-Reply-To: <7c91e618ae1dd30e11790017baf3f7d1@cacr.caltech.edu> References: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> <7c91e618ae1dd30e11790017baf3f7d1@cacr.caltech.edu> Message-ID: Hi Roy, > 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. There's an ontology workshop at Strasbourg at the end of October - I'm giving a talk (and hopefully a demo, but so far I just have a logo) about a small ontology based application that will use an ontology based on VOEvent to correlate solar events in different catalogues. I'll let you know when I get past the logo stage. :) cheers, Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Auden, MSSL Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking RH5 6NT Tel: +44 (0)1483 204 276 eSDO Technical Lead, AstroGrid Developer From Alberto.Micol at eso.org Thu Sep 29 06:24:51 2005 From: Alberto.Micol at eso.org (Alberto Micol) Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:24:51 +0200 Subject: Instrument related UCDs Message-ID: Dear UCDers, I'm pretty aware that this email comes far too late, and I apologise for that. Still, for the next round, I think that some of the UCD descriptions should be improved to avoid confusion. But please keep reading, and imagine a naive user which might or might not have deep knowledge on how an instrument works; still s/he is given the task to assign ucds to different quantities. Here we go: E instr.background: Is it the signal induced by e.g. the electronics of the detector, or, another example, by the heat of the detector? Note: it is not to be confused with the readout noise (instr.det.noise). If the answer is yes, then... Q instr.skyLevel: ...Is it different than instr.background? If it is a "sky" level, why does it belong to instr? Also, why is it not marked with the syntax code "E"? Q instr.det.psf: Is this the FWHM of the PSF, or the PSF itself? Maybe a better description to clarify... And why is it associated to instr.det? Usually the PSF is the product of the convolution of various components starting from the seeing; is this just only the component induced by the instrument optics (including the telescope itself), or is it really meant to be the component coming from the fact that the detector is sampled into pixels? I would think that the ucd for PSF FWHM is: phys.size;phys.resolution;instr (but phys.resolution does not exist). instr.precision: Is it the sampling precision, or e.g. the astrometric accuracy? instr.det.qe, instr.sensitivity: At first sight one might think that those two ucds are equivalent! I would recommend to change the description of instr.sensitivity to actually explicit the fact that the sensitivity includes BOTH the detector QE AND the transmission of the optics (at least that is my guess!). Q instr.tel: Is it suppose to be the name of the telescope? Or is it just only an adjective (in which case Q should be changed to S)? Q instr.tel.focalLength exists; what about instr.tel.diameter? Let me end this with TRANSMISSION: Regarding transmission I would like to see explicited in the text that phys.transm is actually the covolution of various things, eg.: phys.transm = instr.sensitivity * instr.filter.transm (where I assume that instr.sensitivity = instr.det.qe * instr.optics.transm and notice that I invented the last one, which does not exist) I think we have to make very clear such distinctions, otherwise people will use e.g. instr.sensitivity, while they mean phys.transm, or viceversa! Alberto From andrea.preitemartinez at rm.iasf.cnr.it Wed Sep 28 08:05:02 2005 From: andrea.preitemartinez at rm.iasf.cnr.it (Andrea Preite Martinez) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:05:02 +0200 Subject: Call for contributions Message-ID: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> (This message is sent to the UCD and UCD-sci lists: I?m sorry, some of you will receive it twice!) Dear All, The InterOp meeting is approaching, and there is still ample room for contribution in the Agenda of the UCD session. For the moment I envisage to shortly describe the current status of UCDs and open a discussion on future perspectives. Between the present situation and the future development of ontology, I think there is the need for an intermediate step. Up to now, with the "first generation" UCDs, we tackled the problem of describing mainly "quantities" appearing in table data, with the addition of various flavours of qualifiers and modifiers. On the other hand there is an increasing need to describe other concepts within a semantic scheme unique and agreed upon by the whole community. Elements of data models or object types and phenomena of "events" are typical examples of what we might want to integrate in a "second generation" UCDs. We should keep in mind that we need to go any way through this intermediate step in order to build the ontology. By the way, this is the reason why we asked in Kyoto to add "semantics" to the name of the working group. I think it is time to discuss how to build the second generation of UCDs. Some of you already proposed ucd-words of this kind during the recent discussion on the ucd vocabulary. Next UCD session is the right place to restart the discussion. If you want to contribute, send me a title and the time required in order to update the agenda of the session. Andrea ============================================================================== Andrea Preite Martinez andrea.preitemartinez at rm.iasf.cnr.it Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale Tel.:+39.06.4993.4641 Area di Ricerca di Tor Vergata Fax.:+39.06.2066.0188 Via del Fosso del Cavaliere 100 Cell:+39.339.3817355 00133 Roma CDS :+33.3.90242473 ============================================================================== From seaman at noao.edu Wed Sep 28 09:42:04 2005 From: seaman at noao.edu (Rob Seaman) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 09:42:04 -0700 Subject: Call for contributions In-Reply-To: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> References: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> Message-ID: On Sep 28, 2005, at 8:05 AM, Andrea Preite Martinez wrote: > Elements of data models or object types and phenomena of "events" > are typical examples of what we might want to integrate in a > "second generation" UCDs. Yes, indeed. I think we can all reach agreement on such things. > On the other hand there is an increasing need to describe other > concepts within a semantic scheme unique and agreed upon by the > whole community. No, not at all. A single, unique UCD namespace will never satisfy all requirements and all users. The current UCD effort has produced a worthy product. The way to protect the investment in the current UCDs, as well as to support the development of new classes of UCDs, is to recognize just that - that "VOConcepts" and other future DM specific UCDs represent separate classes of UCDs - separate namespaces. UCDs are not XML, but the concept of a purpose specific namespace is larger than either. We cannot possibly afford to wait for agreement from the whole community for every single UCD that is proposed. The solution is to recognize that UCDs live in multiple lists managed by multiple authorities, i.e., they live in namespaces (whether or not we call them that). And bear in mind that as the VO matures, the community in question will become the larger astronomy and physics (and geoscience and planetary science and exobiology and...) community, not just the current cozy coffee klatch. Terminology will inevitably collide. We should allow for that now, rather than address each name collision as some ad hoc shoehorning of concepts into nomenclature that fits badly or not at all. > We should keep in mind that we need to go any way through this > intermediate step in order to build the ontology. Yes and no. Yes this is the correct path to follow. No, I am skeptical that a single universe-girdling ontology will emerge at the end of the day. If the VO semantic efforts fail, it will be due to over-reaching and over-generalization. We need to define a process for building separate, project and purpose specific, ontologies (plural). Rob Seaman NOAO -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From roy at cacr.caltech.edu Wed Sep 28 11:10:19 2005 From: roy at cacr.caltech.edu (Roy Williams) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:10:19 -0700 Subject: Call for contributions In-Reply-To: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> References: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> Message-ID: <7c91e618ae1dd30e11790017baf3f7d1@cacr.caltech.edu> 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 From eca at mssl.ucl.ac.uk Wed Sep 28 11:21:06 2005 From: eca at mssl.ucl.ac.uk (Elizabeth Auden) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 19:21:06 +0100 (BST) Subject: Call for contributions In-Reply-To: <7c91e618ae1dd30e11790017baf3f7d1@cacr.caltech.edu> References: <20050928170502.cr5855mfvtwk004o@webmail.sic.rm.cnr.it> <7c91e618ae1dd30e11790017baf3f7d1@cacr.caltech.edu> Message-ID: Hi Roy, > 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. There's an ontology workshop at Strasbourg at the end of October - I'm giving a talk (and hopefully a demo, but so far I just have a logo) about a small ontology based application that will use an ontology based on VOEvent to correlate solar events in different catalogues. I'll let you know when I get past the logo stage. :) cheers, Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Auden, MSSL Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking RH5 6NT Tel: +44 (0)1483 204 276 eSDO Technical Lead, AstroGrid Developer From Alberto.Micol at eso.org Thu Sep 29 06:24:51 2005 From: Alberto.Micol at eso.org (Alberto Micol) Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:24:51 +0200 Subject: Instrument related UCDs Message-ID: Dear UCDers, I'm pretty aware that this email comes far too late, and I apologise for that. Still, for the next round, I think that some of the UCD descriptions should be improved to avoid confusion. But please keep reading, and imagine a naive user which might or might not have deep knowledge on how an instrument works; still s/he is given the task to assign ucds to different quantities. Here we go: E instr.background: Is it the signal induced by e.g. the electronics of the detector, or, another example, by the heat of the detector? Note: it is not to be confused with the readout noise (instr.det.noise). If the answer is yes, then... Q instr.skyLevel: ...Is it different than instr.background? If it is a "sky" level, why does it belong to instr? Also, why is it not marked with the syntax code "E"? Q instr.det.psf: Is this the FWHM of the PSF, or the PSF itself? Maybe a better description to clarify... And why is it associated to instr.det? Usually the PSF is the product of the convolution of various components starting from the seeing; is this just only the component induced by the instrument optics (including the telescope itself), or is it really meant to be the component coming from the fact that the detector is sampled into pixels? I would think that the ucd for PSF FWHM is: phys.size;phys.resolution;instr (but phys.resolution does not exist). instr.precision: Is it the sampling precision, or e.g. the astrometric accuracy? instr.det.qe, instr.sensitivity: At first sight one might think that those two ucds are equivalent! I would recommend to change the description of instr.sensitivity to actually explicit the fact that the sensitivity includes BOTH the detector QE AND the transmission of the optics (at least that is my guess!). Q instr.tel: Is it suppose to be the name of the telescope? Or is it just only an adjective (in which case Q should be changed to S)? Q instr.tel.focalLength exists; what about instr.tel.diameter? Let me end this with TRANSMISSION: Regarding transmission I would like to see explicited in the text that phys.transm is actually the covolution of various things, eg.: phys.transm = instr.sensitivity * instr.filter.transm (where I assume that instr.sensitivity = instr.det.qe * instr.optics.transm and notice that I invented the last one, which does not exist) I think we have to make very clear such distinctions, otherwise people will use e.g. instr.sensitivity, while they mean phys.transm, or viceversa! Alberto