How We Operate and How to Join

We try to follow a roadmap for our activities , that is discussed at every IVOA Interoperability Meeting which occur twice per year. The group has different workpackages and interacts with other WG in the IVOA. Discussions are led on the data model forum, where everybody can post his ideas and comments or follow the discussions. See the datamodel mailing list.

The most important output of the working group are the specification documents that formalizes the modeling efforts led by this group and propose standards to the IVOA standardization process. Some members take an active role in writing these documents, while others review the documents, make comments, and/or possibly test and implement the proposed design. When a document is fairly advanced, discussion of the document will migrate to this Twiki site on specialized pages (that can be found here Specifications).

All interested are welcome to participate in any of the above activities. Here are some things you can do to "join" the working group(listed roughly from easiest to hardest):

1. Subscribe to the Data Model mailing list and participate in the discussion.
2. Create a TWiki Login for yourself so that you provide comments on specification documents. (See the TWikiTutorial to learn how to edit pages.) Add yourself to the list of contributing members on DataModelWorkingGroup main page.
3. Make text contributions to ongoing specification document authoring, or volunteer to take up editorship of a new spec.
4. Get involved in a 'data model'-related application development project. This might either be an implementation of one of the models or an application that uses these models.

Rules

They are described in UML via a Class diagram, enriched with documentation.

From the UML classes an XML schema is derived, that provides a master document representation for publishing data sets in the VO. An XML instance documents describing a data collection is considered VO compliant if it is valid with respect to this schema. Other serialisation modes are also used : VOtable, (Utype, values)lists, FITS keywords lists.