As well as recording the location of a volume TMS also holds ownership details. Ownership of a volume is by ACCOUNT and OWNER. ACCOUNT is the usual CERN accounting group, gg - all Delphi volumes, for example, are owned by account XX.
The OWNER field in the TMS database is a little more special, however. All registered CERN computer users have an individual user code, or UUU, and if the owner field is a three character UUU then the volume is owned by the corresponding individual.
If the owner field is longer than 3 characters this then it cannot correspond to a UUU and so no real person owns the volume, instead the owner field is being used to group the volume into a POOL for a particular purpose. For example most experiments wish to maintain a pool of volumes which can be allocated to users on request. These volumes can be given the TMS 'owner' GGUSER and it is then easy to see which volumes remain in the pool and to choose one for allocation - perhaps with the GETPOOL command, or better, using the routine FMALLO. The FATMEN shell command ALLOCATE may also be used to allocate volumes. Note that FATMEN only retains information on volumes by generic name. That is, there must be at least one file in the FATMEN catalogue on a given volume. Another example would be to have the 'owner' for all DST volumes as GGDST so users could easily list the available DSTs (and even for a given location using the QUERY CONTENTS command).
Volumes may be moved between pools using the routine FMPOOL.