[iaufwg] Revised FITS Registry Proposal

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2006-05-23T16:42:06 -0400, William Pence hath writ:
> Getting back to the Registry proposal, I hope more of you will indicate
> here whether you think the current proposal is ready to be implemented (or
> not). I don't want to proceed unless at least a reasonable fraction of you
> think it is a good idea.

With the proviso that this is experimental, I think it is a good idea.

In version 3, section 5, I would change the word "felt" to "deemed"
in order to seem more rational about requested changes.

The proposal wording makes it clear that there will be details
of the scheme which are not yet specified.

Section 2 (requirements) seems to want some sort of canonical name for
a convention which, given the purview, should be a charcter string
consisting of up to 68 printable ASCII characters.  The IAUFWG would
have to manage that namespace, and to resolve issues of whether a new
version of an existing convention merits a new name.  In the short run
this would be a way of uniquely identifying various conventions.  In
the longer run I would expect a recommendation that a new keyword be
reserved as a place to put the convention name into FITS files.

This raises the issue of what other sorts of metadata will be included
in the registry as atributes of each of the registered entities.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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