[iaufwg] IAUFWG review of the new draft FITS Standard

[William Pence]

Dear IAU FITS Working Group Members,

It is now time for us (the IAU FWG) to conduct a final review of the 
proposed new FITS Standard document, leading eventually to a vote on 
whether or not to accept it as the official Standard.  To jog your 
memories, here is a brief chronology of how we got to this point:

   12/2006: Technical Panel is appointed (Chiappetti, Page, Pence,
            Shaw, and Stobie) to draft updates and clarifications
            to the FITS Standard.
   07/2007: Technical Panel releases version 3.0 for comments
   10/2007: Public comment period closes
   11/2007: Technical Panel produces revised draft 3.0a
   12/2007: Draft 3.0a sent to Regional FITS committees for review
   02/2008: Regional committees generally endorse the new draft, with
            a few further comments
   03/2008: Technical Panel produces revised draft 3.0b

This latest draft of the FITS Standard is available for your review at 
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_draft.html along with other supporting 
documents, including,

- A 12 page summary of the Technical Panel's response to the suggestions 
that were received during the public comment period and the Regional 
FITS committee reviews.

- A 137 page color-coded document that highlights the differences 
between this latest draft version 3.0b and the current official version 
2.1b.

While reviewing this material, please keep in mind that all the proposed 
changes to the FITS standard are only recommendations at this point. 
Any IAU FWG member can propose further amendments to the document during 
this final review period, either to introduce new changes, or to revise 
or withdraw any of the currently proposed changes.  If necessary, we 
will conduct procedural votes (which only require a simple majority to 
be accepted) on any proposed amendments prior to conducting a formal 
vote on the whether or not to accept the document as the new official 
FITS Standard.

In particular, there are 2 issues that were raised back in November that 
we still need to resolve:

1.  Arnold Rots suggested that it might be useful to add ISO-8601 
data-time to the recognized data types (presumably in Chapter 5 of the 
latest draft).   In response, 3 of you (Shaw, Forveille, and Gabriel) 
felt that while this was perhaps worthy of further discussion, it is 
rather late in the process to make this change to the current draft, so 
it may be better to defer this to the next revision of the Standard 
(whenever that might be).   Do the rest of you agree to defer this 
suggestion for now?

2.  Mark Calabretta reiterated his desire for the new Standard to note 
any inconsistencies in syntax between previous versions of the Standard, 
either as an appendix or as footnotes throughout the document. An 
example might be where version 2 of the Standard turned the widely used 
convention of using a slash character to separate the keyword value and 
comment fields, into a requirement. The Technical Panel had declined to 
implement this suggestion, mainly on the grounds that it could require a 
significant effort to make a detailed comparison of all the different 
versions of the FITS Standard (and the original FITS papers too).  So 
far, there has been no discussion of this issue here on this email list.

My own feeling on this is that I would not object to adding footnotes to 
highlight a few cases where a current FITS requirement was not clearly 
stated in some previous versions of the Standard or in the original FITS 
papers.  I don't think however that this issue warrants the time and 
energy that would be needed to try to document every change that has 
occurred in the history of FITS.  Perhaps Mark (and others) could 
propose a list of instances where a footnote would be appropriate.


So with this preamble, I would like to now open up the discussion period 
here on IAU FWG email list about any issues regarding the proposed new 
FITS Standard document.  Please try to post your comments here within 
the next 2 to 3 weeks if possible, so as to not needlessly delay the 
final vote on this matter.

regards,
Bill Pence
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                       William.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662       HEASARC        +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                      +1-301-286-1684 (fax)