Its mission is to facilitate international coordination and collaboration necessary for enabling global and integrated access to data gathered by astronomical observatories.
The main task of the organisation so far has focused on defining standards to ensure interoperability of the different virtual observatory projects already existing or in development.
The IVOA now comprises 19 VO projects from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The Semantics Working Group is concerned with the meaning or the interpretation of words, sentences, or other language forms in the context of astronomy.
This includes standard descriptions of astrophysical objects, data types, concepts, events, or of any other phenomena in astronomy.
The WG covers the study of relationships between words, symbols and concepts, as well as the meaning of such representations (ontology).