Data models in the VO: How do they make code better?

摘要

Data Models exist in people's heads. Data modelling consists of making these explicit on paper, so that (a) we can discover if there is more than one important model, and (b) we can develop using the model which has the best impedance match with the targeted community. We contend that there is in fact more than one model relevant to the Virtual Observatory (VO), and that while the VOTable model is a valuable fit to the archivists' model of data, it may be a poor match for many users or (much the same thing) for the software written to service the sort of end-user astronomical applications which the VO targets. We will also review some of the various modelling languages available.