[iaufwg] [fitsbits] Start of the ''MBFITS" Public Comment Period

[Doug Tody]

I agree with Bill; MBFITS is an important convention which should be
registered.  Likewise SDFITS etc.  The point of the registry of
conventions should be to index all of these.

Another important domain-specific convention which I am not sure I
have heard mentioned is Euro3D, which is based on FITS binary table.
(The name is unfortunate for something which may be broadly used,
but that is what they call it).

 	- Doug


On Fri, 25 May 2007, William Pence wrote:

> I think this MBFITS convention meets all these requirements.  Some might
> argue that a 60 page description document is not really "concise", but
> we have to be realistic about what documentation we can expect to
> receive; we can't expect people to spend time writing  (and maintaining
> in the future) new documentation simply for the FITS Registry if
> existing documents will suffice.  This is especially true for
> configuration controlled documents like this MBFITS document;  even if
> someone was willing to take the time to write a more concise summary of
> the MBFITS convention, getting approval to release such a document might
> require a lot of time and effort that the project is unwilling to fund.
>
> There are several other conventions in the queue to be considered for
> the Registry in the near future that are somewhat similar to the MBFITS
> convention (e.g., Single Disk FITS, Interferometry Data Interchange
> FITS, and the Optical/IR Interferometry Data Standard format).   All
> these conventions are fairly complex and have relatively long
> description documents.  I can't think of any good reason to exclude
> conventions like this from the registry, and on the contrary,  I think
> it will prove to be beneficial to the FITS community to have all these
> conventions documented in one place in the Registry.