Plenary introduction

Monday --Aud

Slides here

Semantics Session at the November 2009 Interop Meeting

Wednesday 09.00-10.30 -- ESO Council Room

Semantics Session: Preliminary Schedule

Speaker	Title	Time

Sebastien Derriere	Introduction	09:00
	Vocabularies .pdf	09:10
	Voc for VOEvent
	Voc for Charac Obs DM
	Semantic annotations in web documents	09:45
Norman Gray	Future of Semantics WG	10:00

Semantics session notes :

Vocabularies document
- Became a REC in October 2009
- There are five implementations
Vocabulary mapping
- Explicator application http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk/code/
- For example used to declare mappings of Vizier keywords to journal keywords
- Mapping is critical
- The reference vocabularies do NOT contain mappings (they are in external files)
- Rick: journals could force authors to add keywords to published tables
  - have a tool producing tables with proper description and Latex ?
- Matthew: include vocabulary terms in ontology files or not?
Rick: we need a document describing how to create vocabularies in practice
- Sebastien: there is a guide for registry users. This could serve as a model for a Vocabularies 'howto'
- Perhaps produce such a document after someone has gone through the process. For example, the VOEvent people
- Catalina use a very small vocabulary
- Rick: start such a guide on an IVOA wiki page
Matthew: VOEvent 'why' sections aren't currently being used
- Maybe this is a chicken-and-egg problem
- Expect to get takeup later
Vocabularies WG support other WGs
- how?
- Need expressed from VOEvent, Char'n DM, ObsTAP, Registry/VOResources
- Matthew: Data Mining IG aims to produce an ontology of data mining tasks, suitable for some sort of Semantic Web Services
Vocabularies in the registry
- Various people have looked at this problem, though not in a great deal of detail
- Sebastien: some registry subject entries are remarkably useless!
- Possibly develop a 'dictionary' service, which helps users find vocabulary definitions (building on the definitions and scope notes within the SKOS file) : just a matter of code!
Matthew : parsing astronomical telegrams : what's in there ?
RDFa for astronomers
- Illustrating including SAMP properties within an HTML page
- eg: a samp.coord.pointAt.sky element
Vocabulary development
- Mediawiki http://vocabularies.referata.com
- Possible to output RDF, and then have SKOS
- Norman/Stuart will put IVOAT (from Rick) and VOEvent (from Matthew) on http://referata.com
- Rick: publish Utype data models on our own initiative
- Rick suggested that it would be useful to make the wiki page as basic as possible. But as it's currently hosted (on referata.com) there's a limit to what we can customise
- These services could potentially be hosted on an amazon EC2 instance (USD 0.10/instance/hour -> USD 876.60 /year)
  - be careful with bandwith cost too!