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astrothesaurus / UAT

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus is an open, interoperable and community-supported thesaurus of astronomical and astrophysical concepts and their relationships.
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Modify Concept: Virtual Observatories #364

Open msdemlei opened 8 months ago

msdemlei commented 8 months ago

Name the concept in question

Virtual Observatories, http://astrothesaurus.org/uat/1774

Describe the change

I would like to change the preferred label to “Virtual Observatory” (i.e., singular), and provide a description like:

The Virtual Observatory is a decentralized, international data infrastructure in astronomy, held together by common standards and a resource registry.

This may amount to a slight change to the concept itself; it was probably intended to mean something like “A web service producing images of the sky by electronic means” or similar. However, I maintain that there is perhaps not suffient reason to tell this kind of astronomy service from other sorts of astronomy services, which are already covered by uat:1856; if we wanted to make a difference between image-making and non-image-making services, we would at least have to define where the limits are (atlas services? pointed observation archives? simulated observations? general visualisation tools?).

Also, if you search for keyword:1774, the (few) articles that come back all seem to use the keyword as “Virtual Observatory” rather than “Virtual Observatories” (with the exception of 1874AnPar..14D...1B, where what's matched is not the UAT concept).

On the other hand, 1774 with its updated meaning would be mighty useful in the VO Registry (and again is already widely used with that sense; select count(*) from rr.res_subject where res_subject='virtual-observatories' gives 133 resources at this point).

BartlettAstro commented 1 month ago

@katieefrey Is this ready for Release 5.1.0?

katieefrey commented 1 month ago

Best practices for thesaurus management is that a concept never changes meaning. A label can change if it is decided that better words describe the concept, or if typos need to be fixed, but the meaning, the concept it self, should not change.

Looking deeper into the provenance, this concept is found in UAT Beta as "Virtual observatories." However, the IVOA Thesaurus has "virtual observatory" The IAU Thesaurus ...apparently isn't online anymore, which is a shame... The Wayback Machine hasn't archived the relevant page of the original site, so we have to rely on the backup from IVOA, which does not include any concept similar to virtual observatory.

It's possible that the original third party company that merged the UAT and gave us UAT Beta saw the singular "virtual observatory" in IVOAT and decided to pluralize it, mistaking it for a type of observatory rather than a proper noun. If it is a category, than pluralizing is best practice, but if its a proper noun, then it wouldn't be.

Anyway, since the concept probably originates from the IVOA Thesaurus, it was probably intended to be a proper noun, and it makes sense to make the change as requested by Markus. If the concept has already been used to describe a category, than it is a stickier situation, because you will be inherently changing the meaning of a concept already in use, which is against best practices. Markus makes the point that it has not been used to describe a category.

The other, more complicated, option is that because the label currently implies a category description, and the new label implies a proper noun, it might be best to deprecate the concept entirely and create a new one.

msdemlei commented 1 month ago

On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 08:41:05AM -0700, Katie Frey wrote:

Looking deeper into the provenance, this concept is found in UAT Beta as "Virtual observatories."

Thanks for that research. I should have done it myself.

the original site, so we have to rely on the backup from IVOA, which does not include any concept similar to virtual observatory.

Side consideration: since Rick, I think, will be about at or even beyond retirement, should we do an institutional mirror of this page? And if so, should the UAT or IVOA semantics do that?

practices. Markus makes the point that it has not been used to describe a category.

I'd actually make the point that it has been used in the sense of Virtual Observatory almost exclusively, certainly in the VO itself: http://dc.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/wirr/q/ui/fixed?field0=uat&operator0=%3D&operand0=virtual-observatories.

On ADS, there's just 9 records for 1774, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/?q=keyword%3A1774; but what I see (well, clearly except for 2009BmBe...33.1046H, "Anaerobic digestion of slaughterhouse by-products" -- yikes!) means VO rather than "some web page that shows the sky".