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[fitsbits] FITS on Wikipedia
Rob Seaman wrote:
.. google FITS: .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS from which we find, for instance, that "FITS is the most commonly used digital file format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_format in astronomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomy." .. This URL was a pleasant surprise for me. Its description of FITS is terse, but precise, and contains the necessary hints about the generality of the design, capabilities and usage of FITS, while still acknowledging that simple FITS image files are very common. The only name that I see in a brief glance at the history page is that of a graduate student at Manchester, Mike Peel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Peel I say 'Well done, Mike Peel!'. Did anyone else contribute to this Wikipedia page? If so, please identify yourselves, so that you too can get some thanks and praise. -=-=- Suggestions -=-=- * Probably the Wikipedia text should contain a URL for the FITS MIME RFC: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4047.txt * Probably the section about tables in FITS should at least hint at the full generality of BINTABLE, especially the concept of (variable length) multi-dimensional arrays in fields. * Citation of HDF, CDF and NetCDF in the "See also" section is appropriate. Perhaps GeoTIFF ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotiff ) should be added to that list of data formats that are reasonably comparable to FITS. I suggest that terse comparisons of the features of these formats with the features of FITS be added to the links; Wikipedia is a a truly 'open' project, so these descriptions could be added by anybody in the FITS community. * Wikipedia is multi-lingual. The FITS community is multi-lingual. It may be appropriate for members of the FITS community to produce translated versions of this first FITS Wikipedia page. * Perhaps the Wikipedia URL should be cited in some of our FITS web pages, along with the MIME-code URL. -=-=- On planting descriptions of FITS -=-=- From the beginning of FITS, long ago, one of our great goals has been to plant precise descriptions of the format in places that we judge will have a chance for long-term survival, motivated by the need to support FITS as an archival data format. The primary place that we chose was one of the major refereed standard journals of astronomy, Astronomy & Astrophysics, a journal that is likely to survive as paper copies (or electronic equivalents) in several hundred libraries around the World for the next few centuries. We (the FITS community) have also planted a wide variety of FITS-related documents in many secondary institutional archives that are likely to survive for at least the next few decades. Finally, and most recently, the registration of FITS as a MIME-code RFC embeds a precise description of the format in the machine-readable documentation of the Internet. I expect that MIME RFCs will still be readily available in 2032, and I wouldn't be surprised if they prove to survive to 2107. This idea of planting FITS descriptions in archival places was a key personal motivation for me as I was promoting the MIME RFC project in the 1990s, in addition to the obvious current operational need for official MIME codes for FITS. I consider this Wikipedia page to be yet another place where a precise description of FITS has been planted. While the Wikipedia project is often criticized, it is now clear that it has succeeded in creating an invaluable general information resource, a resource that is likely to survive for decades at least, and perhaps for a century or more. My own mental model in this matter is to imagine that some astronomy professor in some distant time tells an astronomy graduate student to compare some data recently acquired with related archival data. The professor might or might not be knowledgeable about FITS. FITS might or might not be in regular use in that distant time. There is no assurance at all that any of our current software environments will survive in that era, so the graduate student might have to crack our FITS files with custom software. I hope that the FITS header will contain a precise bibliographical citation to one of our journal articles, a paper that will aid that graduate student in designing the custom software. I hope that a search operation finds information about FITS. The graduate student will know astronomy, so the context of the metadata in the headers will make sense, and will raise questions in the mind of the graduate student that will trigger other searches, and I hope that the answers to those questions will soon be found so that our files can be interpreted properly. Originally, in the early days of FITS, my concept of "a distant time" was 40 years, long enough that the early FITS pioneers would be retired (like me). Now, with a whole new generation of FITS pundits in the profession, it is clear to me that "a distant time" reaches much farther into the future, and I even dare to dream that FITS will be acknowledged and understood in 2107, even if it is no longer in regular use. Even though I am now (guardedly) optimistic about this, I still say that we have a duty to plant precise descriptions of the format in multiple places that are likely to survive, and that we have a duty to put precise citations in all of our FITS headers. -Don Wells |
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