First steps towards an ontology for astrophysics

The advent of space-borne astronomical observatories and the enormous amount of data collected by them gave rise to the development of mission-specific archives with increasingly complex and redundant nomenclatures. The situation has come to a point where a common understanding is needed if astronomical archives are to become a major tool for research in the scientific community. The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) is the response of the community to this need but the project encounters difficulties associated with the lack of a consensus ontology in the field plus a unified representation scheme. In this paper we justify the need for such an ontology by examining the problems arisen so far in issues like interoperability, data modelling and data access; we asses the specifications required and propose a high level ontology to serve as a basis for future developments.