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Status report of the VOTable WG
	    29 January 2004
	    Francois Ochsenbein (CDS)
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Following the ADASS meeting in Strasbourg, where a discussion on
the evolution of VOTable could take place, some improvements were 
agreed for a version 1.1 of the standard. A first draft of this new 
version was distributed to the steering commitee of the VOTable 
group in November, followed by a second draft on Jan.25.
(http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaVOTable/VOTable-1.09.pdf).
The final draft will be posted on the IVOA page this week, and
we expect to turn it into a Proposed Recommendation in the fortcoming
weeks. The main differences with version 1.0 are the introduction of 
structures in tables via a new GROUP element, and a possibility of linking
a VOTable document with an external data model via the new utype attribute. 
Most of the other changes consist in clarifications of the conventions
and illustrations of the actual XML schema.

The VOTable forum was also extremely active in the recent weeks
(several hundred messages!) with discussions mainly about the 
facility of using the "standard" XML tools on VOTables.
This could lead to a next version of VOTable which could include
a 4th alternative of writing the data attached to a VOTable
(in addition to the TABLEDATA, FITS and BINARY references).
It is worth noticing that the present schema of VOTable is quite 
compatible with the XML tools, and that it does carry on the
_astronomical_ metadata associated to the tables, which remains the
fundamental property of VOTable that enables an interoperability of 
the data shared in the VO framework.
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