[iaufwg] IAUFWG review of the new draft FITS Standard

[Andreas Wicenec]

On 17.03.2008, at 20:56, Steve Allen wrote:

> On Mon 2008-03-17T13:19:32 -0400, William Pence hath writ:
>> 1.  Arnold Rots suggested that it might be useful to add ISO-8601
>
> I agree that it deserves discussion, but I agree that it should be
> deferred.  The ITU-R process of reconsidering the nature of UTC
> seems likely to change the notion of humanity's concept of time,
> and until that process is more nearly finished action on our part
> is definitely premature.

ISO-8601 is just a format description, I guess that even after ITU-R  
we will
have years, month, days, hours, minutes and seconds and fractions  
thereof
plus some notion of time zones. Thus I don't expect that we would  
have to change
the *format* at all. What we may have to change is the reference  
frames behind
the values, but since FITS does not describe anything like this for  
keyword values
and formally only for WCS for data values I don't see a problem here.

Just saw your latest e-mail: Since we do have this Y2K agreement (I  
forgot about this),
why shouldn't we put it into the standard?

>
>> 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.
>
> I agree and applaud the notation of any which are pointed out, but
> we should not pretend to be producing an exhaustive list.  As such
> it might be best to insert footnotes referring to an appendix which
> introduces itself by disclaiming its completeness.
>
> --
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