[fitsbits] Five FITS Proposals

[William Pence]

During the recent FITS Birds-of-a-Feather session at the ADASS meeting 
on Sept 30th, there was some discussion about the shortcomings of the 
current FITS format.  This discussion has motivated me to consider what 
relatively simple changes could be made to FITS to address some of the 
most commonly heard complaints.  After some discussions with a few of my 
colleagues, I've drafted 5 specific proposals that should be fairly 
simple to implement:

1.  Allow longer keyword names
2.  Allow arbitrarily long character string keyword values
3.  Allow additional characters in keyword names
4.  Introduce a new FITS version keyword
5.  Define a convention for preallocating space for keywords in FITS 
headers for later use

The full description of these proposals is available at

http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/proposals/proposals.html

I think these proposals would be a good first step towards addressing 
the most basic problems with FITS.  In particular, the first 2 proposals 
would make it easier to record much richer meta data in FITS headers, 
which could be useful when developing new conventions to address some of 
the other issues with the FITS format.

I am interested to know if other FITSBITS subscribers here support these 
proposals and/or have suggestions to improve them.  If they are 
favorably received, then I hope that the IAU FITS Working Group will 
expeditiously consider approving them and incorporate them into the next 
version of the FITS Standard document.

regards,
Bill Pence