[fitsbits] Five FITS Proposals

[Joe Hourcle]

On Oct 23, 2013, at 1:13 PM, William Pence wrote:

> 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


If the community believes that #4 is useful, I'd recommend instead of
just putting in a number that you recommend a DOI or bibcode to the
relevant paper -- that way, someone who might come across the file
in the future will have a better clue as to what the value means.

As the bibcode will fit within 70 characters, in the case of 
uncompressed FITS files, there would be no difference in file size.

-Joe

-----
Joe Hourcle
Programmer/Analyst
Solar Data Analysis Center
Goddard Space Flight Center