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

[Doug Tody]

On Fri, 25 May 2007, Robert Hanisch wrote:

> I guess my point is, fine, let's just put all these documents and links in
> the FITS registry and be done with it, especially for the things that are
> very instrument-specific.  I would put multi-beam FITS, single dish FITS,
> interferometry FITS, and so on in this category.  It's great that the
> practitioners in these sub-fields of astronomy have gotten together and
> agreed upon keywords and structures.  To me, though, these are not
> conventions in the sense of generic schemes for encoding information (like
> tiled image compression, foreign file encapsulation, or the INHERIT stuff),
> all of which are independent of the type of instrumentation used to acquire
> the data.

I think we should differentiate between true instrumental data formats
or data models, used to encode data from a specific instrument, and
conventions like MBFITS, SDFITS, Euro3D, etc. which while used to
represent some class of data are not specific to a single instrument.
I agree that data-oriented conventions are a different type of
convention than a system-oriented convention such as a compression
scheme, foreign file encapsulation, etc.  Perhaps we should add the
concept of the convention type.

To me "convention" suggests some sort of general scheme, layered upon
more generic standards, which can have multiple instances or use cases
where it is applied.  If there is only one instance, e.g., a specific
instrumental data format, then it is not a reusable convention.
We might find it useful to register intrumental data formats too,
but unless there is some general model with multiple instances or
applications it is not a convention (or a standard).

 	- Doug