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This wiki is a testing ground for collaborative astronomy vocabulary development, run by Norman Gray, Stuart Chalmers and Iadh Ounis, originally as part of the Explicator project (see http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk/).

If you have any queries about using this site, or would like to add your own astronomy vocabulary, please contact us.

How to use this site?

This site allows you to publish and then work together on developing a vocabulary. What would this look like? A good place to start is just to dive straight in and look at the currently available vocabularies:

Currently hosted astronomy vocabularies

Why use this site?

A good question! There are many examples of vocabularies already in use (e.g. http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/Vocabularies/vocabularies-20090825/IVOAT/dict/A.html), but there are a number of advantages to editing using Semantic Mediawiki as a basis for developing new ones, or hosting vocabularies already developed:

Collaborative Development 

The wiki ethos means that any collaborator can edit vocabularies, and these edits are fully traceable and assignable to that collaborator. It offers much more in terms of collaboration than a static web presence.

Semantics 

The vocabularies here can be edited then exported using a structured, machine-readable semantic represenatation. There is no need to have the web representation of the vocabulary separate from the machine understandable version. A semantic mediawiki provides you with both - you can immediately get access to a structured machine-readable version of your updated vocabulary.

In-depth search 

We can search intelligently over data held in the wiki and query data like you would a database. For example, "find me all terms narrower than 'Arith'". Go to the [[Special:Ask]] page (click here:Special:Ask) and enter [[Narrower::Arith]] - the search results can be exported in a number of formats, or even embedded and re-used in your own wiki pages.

Lots more....

A note about the IVOA Vocabularies

This site is also a testing ground for the semantic representations of the vocabularies in the IVOA: http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/Vocabularies.html

It currently contains versions of 5 IVOA vocabularies:

* The UCD1+ Vocabulary
* The 1993 IAU Thesaurus
* IVOA Thesaurus
* Vocabulary for Astronomy & Astrophysics Journal keywords (Version 1.0)
* The list of AOIM keywords in VOcabulary format (Version 1.0)

See the full list of Vocabularies here: Category:Vocabulary