[Voevent-core] Draft v0.6, VOThings & UCD usage

[Frederic V. "Rick" Hessman]

On 6 May 2005, at 12:37 pm, Patricio F. Ortiz wrote:

>>> - It seems to me that VOThing is unlikely to be embraced as a name.
>>> Suggestions?  Perhaps this facility should exist underneath VOEvent
>>> itself in some fashion.  Other VO projects needing access would then
>>> simply reference us in return.
>>
>> Remember: I purposefully used this terrible name to emphasize the need
>> for a VO-wide solution.     How about "VOConcept"?
>>
>> It seems that the UCD community will also have to address the  
>> usefuless
>> of the present UCD usage: one requires a separate parser to disentagle
>> what "em.X-ray;phot.count;obs.image" is supposed to mean, whereas
>> parsing something like
>>
>> 		<group><ucd>em.X-ray</ucd><ucd>phot.count</ucd><ucd>obs.image</
>> ucd><group>
>>
>> would fall out of the normal processing of the XML document with no
>> real additional effort.
>
> Possibly, but that makes UCDs tied to a particular representation  
> (XML),
> which I don't believe should be the way to go. If UCDs are to be used
> widely, they should remain as independent of the "way to write them"
> as possible. Some people (include me) would like to use UCDs in a non
> XML context, and build our own tools.  Furthermore, which usages do you
> have in mind where a piece of software would be required to  
> "understand"
> the meaning of a UCD? (other than just compare with other UCDs, either
> completely or partially)

I don't see any problem:  in produing the UCDType (not to be confused  
with VOTable's "ucdType", which just says what a ucd should look like  
lexographically), I simply took the official list and put it in a  
schema enumeration so that it could be checked syntactically.  This  
certainly doesn't preclude someone else using the list for totally  
different purposes.

The whole point of UCD's was, at least as I understood it, that one  
could use an official label for a concept which a computer could then  
process.  The UCD tags aren't for people - they're for computers.   By  
making the UCD list available within a schema, we can make the list  
simpler for computers to process.

Rick

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Dr. Frederic V. Hessman      Hessman at Astro.physik.Uni-Goettingen.DE
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