[fitsbits] Start of the ''MBFITS" Public Comment Period

[LC's NoSpam Newsreading account]

I had a quick glance to the the summary and full specification pdf docs 
(quicker for the second).

My impressions are :

 - the summary is too much a summary for the registry
 - the full specification instead is too detailed for the registry
   (however could be provided as supplementary document)

I had no time to comment on the Hierarchical Grouping convention lately 
during the public comment period, but I've just commented to the IAU FWG 
that it looked intimidating ... and MBFITS is a special case of 
application of the Hierarchical Grouping ...

The figure at pag. 3 of the summary (or pag. 6 of the spec) looks rather 
nice (I was commenting on Hierarchical Grouping on the lack of such 
graphical schemes) ... but leaves me confused because I have not 
clear the order of the various extensions (or perhaps there is no order 
because they are not in a single file).

Also I have doubts whether a mission-specific convention like this is 
suitable for inclusion in the registry. Or perhaps this could be 
rephrased saying that the registry shall be split in two parts :

 - one to document general purpose conventions
 - one to document mission specific conventions (specially for major
   missions, and this surely fits in this category)

My idea about the registry was that it should document things like :

 - a limited set of keywords allowing to identify the file as following
   a specific convention
 - all other rules by which a general purpose reader could deal with
   a file identified as following such convention

In this case from the first glance (could be too quick so I could be 
wrong), it looks to me that MBFITS has no specific "signature" keywords 
other than those of Hierarchical Grouping, while it has (lots of) 
mission-specific keywords, and anyhow assumes mission-specific software 
instead of a generic reader (or maybe I'm simply not expert at all in 
radioastronomy, AIPS and alike, and it just requires any radio-aware 
reader).

Lucio Chiappetti (IAUFWG member)

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