[iaufwg] FITS Registry Proposal

[Mark Calabretta]

On Thu 2006/03/23 01:38:03 CDT, Don Wells wrote
in a message to: IAU-FWG <iaufwg at nrao.edu>

Dear Don,

>http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/aips/FITS-IDI.html 

This is an excellent example.  I would imagine the registry entry for
FITS-IDI including pretty much the summary given in the above URL, but
organized slightly differently, more along the lines of a wikipedia
entry with a separate References section that included an entry pointing
to AIPS Memo 102.  I would also add an overview of the file structure
that at least included the names of the bintable extensions but without
trying to document each of the many keywords.

I note that FITS-IDI files do not declare themselves as such, i.e. the
header does not contain the string 'FITS-IDI'.  If I found one lying
around and wanted to know what it was and how to interpret it I would
probably load it into fv and notice that it consists of a number of
bintables.  Choosing a searchable EXTNAME I might attempt to Google for
"ARRAY_GEOMETRY FITS" and this indeed throws up an earlier draft of
AIPS Memo 102 as the second hit together with an example header.  But
strangely it does not find the later draft of AIPS Memo 102, without
even a suggestion that such exists, and it also throws up many hits that
are not related to FITS-IDI.  If I was to search the FITS conventions
repository I should expect to find a more authoritative and less
ambiguous result.

Ideally, incorporating the whole FITS-IDI document into the registry
would allow keyword searches but realistically I don't see this ever
happening.

Regards, Mark