Interactions of SimDB development effort with others WGs.

• SimDB starting page

We plan forming a focus group to tackle SimDB and other issues. This group should contain members from several relevant WGs (DM, Registry, Semantics, DAL), together with the current developers of SimDB, most of the "members" of the theory interest group (TIG). Indeed, some issues have to be solved that require input from a number of working groups, among which are:

• TIG, DM
  We need to finalise the data model and check its relevance. On the one hand this requires input from "domain experts", i.e. people who know and understand the world that we are trying to model here. Within the IVOA these are organised in the theory interest group. We we also need discussions with the DM WG on various aspects of the DM that have similarities to other data models. We need to resolve the issues taht have arisen

• Should a SimDB be stand alone, or should it be possible to have relations between SimDB/Resource-s in different SimDB-s? The answer to this has repercussions for the XML and RDB representations. It may have repercussions for the functioning of a SimDB in case it is supposed to be stand alone (mirroring through harvesting of external resources may be required). We would like to discuss these issues with the Registry WG who have experience with similar issues.

• Should a SimDB be read-only, i.e. represent the work of the groups publishing their own results? Or can external parties register their results in a nearby SimDB? I.e., is SimDB S*AP like, or Registry like (an extension registry?), or something in between? We'd like to discuss this with Registry and DAL WGs.

• We need a common vocabulary for certain attributes in the model that refer to astrophysical concepts and are likely prime targets for queries. We want to use existing vocabularies where possible, but may need to define new ones. We would like to discuss this with the Semantics WG.

• We need a way to express formally that SimDB services offer a particular ADQL query interface. We think we need to discuss these issues with Registry and DAL(TAP) WGs.

• SimDB is a service that ADQL queries can be sent to and may(?) be thought of as a TAP service. However we'd rather not wait until TAPs specification is done before continuing. We would like to discuss the issues arising from this within the context of TAP and ADQL, i.e. need discussions with DAL and VOQL.

It is unclear what the formal organization should be, as there is not a single WG that could most obviously be given responsibility for the further development of this standard and the theory INTEREST group can not move a working draft through the recommendation track.