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[fitsbits] SDFITS Convention Comment: Hardware Keywords



 
 
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Old August 18th 10, 09:29 AM posted to sci.astro.fits
Norman Gray
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Default [fitsbits] SDFITS Convention Comment: Hardware Keywords


Greetings.

On 2010 Aug 17, at 20:32, Eric Greisen wrote:

Tom Kuiper wrote:
The TELESCOP keyword is required in the extension header and its
associated value will be a unique string which identifies the antenna or
antenna array and can be used as a key to a database of antenna
parameters. NRAO will maintain a registry for TELESCOP keyword values.


I actually like the idea of a registry - but who at NRAO did you have in
mind? There was once a FITS office informally at NRAO but that
individual retired some years ago. The AIPS project has been deprecated
for many years and depends solely on me to keep all its users afloat.
The CASA project has little to no interest in FITS. The VLB users
maintain a registry of sorts but at a more detailed level intended to
represent that multiple names and abbreviations used for the same
telescopes when they are used in various VLBI configurations.


An alternative to a registry (or, in one view, a decentralised zeroconf registry) is to require that the TELESCOP value be a URI.

This URI should be one which the telescope, or its associated archive, publishes as the long-term 'name' of the instrument. When retrieved, it can return either or both of human-readable and machine-readable information about the instrument and its parameters. There are Standards-based ways of doing this.

Having said that, a URI can function perfectly happily as a _name_ for a thing, without it being required to be dereferenceable. The DNS provides the namespacing and uniqueness guarantees.

If it's desirable (and I think it is) to have a half-way house between this decentralised approach and something more registry-like, then there'd be a very good case for using PURLs (see http://purl.org) to add a level of (curatable) indirection. This would also help to keep the URIs within the FITS value character limit.

Best wishes,

Norman


--
Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk
School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK


 




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