[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard

[Rob Seaman]

Doug said:

>> Regarding versioning - I don't think FITS has changed enough to  
>> warrant versioning.

I tend to agree, but wanted to point out that such would be needed  
for any new feature or restriction that seriously challenges "once  
FITS, always FITS".  Mark has done a good job of characterizing what  
versioning might mean.

Steve Allen discusses versioning based on conventions or vocabularies:

> I would like to see FITS files be sufficiently regimented that they  
> can be sucked into a data structure which resembles a normalized  
> relational database, but that notion simply was not there from the  
> start.  Again, that sort of thing could be accommodated by adding a  
> registry of conventions and a way of asserting which conventions  
> are in use.

or

> explicitly declaring that certain FITS files are subsets of the  
> FITS standard which conform to a specific vocabulary.

Another option would be subclassing FITS as something like  
"Encapsulated FITS" - either relying on a commenting convention as  
Postscript does (since PS is a programming language), or on keyword  
tags (since FITS is an explicit data structure).

Rob