[fitsbits] Fits Table Entries Referring to Keywords

[Francois Ochsenbein]

My personal suggestion would be to use directly the "bibcodes",
i.e. the 19-byte used by ADS (at your institute!) , Simbad and NED, as well
as on-line astronomical journals (ApJ, AJ, A&A, MNRAS, etc) to summarize 
unambiguously the references from most astronomical publications -- 
e.g. 1987ApJS...63..487Z for the (really existing) 1987 paper by Zhang
& Sampson.  A direct link to the actual abstracts + electronic publication 
can then be installed in a completely automated manner -- and
automated checking can also be performed.  Even if 19 bytes look large 
for a single reference, it's really worth using so widely used conventions...
Francois Ochsenbein
CDS, Strasbourg

>
>I've been writing a X-ray spectral calculation code (given a
>temperature between 10^4 and 10^9 K, and a (low) density, calculate
>the emitted spectrum), and storing all the requisite atomic data in
>FITS files (website at http://hea-www.harvard.edu/APEC).  
>
>I'd like to give detailed references to all of the atomic data, on a
>rate-by-rate basis.  The data is stored in FITS binary tables, with a
>40 character ASCII column for references.  This is enough to give a
>reference for that data that can be reasonably easily parsed by a
>human.  What I'd like to do is change this to store the complete,
>journal-quality references in the header and then give a lookup value
>in the file.  Ie, on a particular line give the reference as "ZS87",
>and then in the header somehow list 
>ZS87 = "Zhang,~H \& Sampson,~D.  1987, ApJ, 581, 183"
>
>What I'm wondering is, is there any kind of standard for this?  I could
>make the ZS87 a keyword with a long string value equal to the full
>reference.  However, I'd like to have complete freedom in making up
>the lookup value, and that means there could be a conflict between the
>lookup value keyword and a real, well-defined FITS keyword.   Or I 
>could use COMMENT statements which I could then parse, but this
>information is an important part of the file, and relegating it to
>"COMMENT" status doesn't seem right either.
>
>Any suggestions?
>
>Randall Smith
>rsmith at cfa.harvard.edu
================================================================================
Francois Ochsenbein       ------       Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg
   11, rue de l'Universite F-67000 STRASBOURG       Phone: +33-(0)3 88 150 755
Email: francois at simbad.u-strasbg.fr   (France)        Fax: +33-(0)3 88 150 740
================================================================================