[fitsbits] REFERENC keyword, etc.

[Joe Hourcle]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2015, THIERRY FORVEILLE wrote:

>> Does your e-mail render this as a link?
>>
>>  	doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.1
>>
>> It's only 'future-proof' in that it's broken now, so when it's broken in
>> the future, no one will notice that anything has changed.  It'd be nice if
>> worked in e-mail readers, PDF makers, and the like but the majority of
>> tools have no idea that they're even supposed to do anything with it.

[trimmed]

>> If we come up with a standard that only calls for URIs in the form
>> 'doi:...', I'll recommend that our community do:
>>
>>  	REF_INST='doi:10.xxx/whatever'
>>  	COMMENT   http://dx.doi.org/10.xxx/whatever
>>
>> ... or something similar.
>>
>> If we're talking about archiving, we should be worrying about making sure
>> that the information is usable to both current & future generations, not
>> worrying about shaving a few bytes off a file.  If we were concerned about
>> the size of the headers, then we'd come up with standards to store the
>> information so it's normalized to at least 3NF.
>>
> I must say that I have a hard time figuring why a line in FITS headers would
> need to be clickable in a browser or mailer. I mean, it's not as if either
> browsers or mailers were the primary tools used for FITS display/analysis ;-)

Very few tools know what to do with doi:... URIs.  Tools that are designed 
*specifically* to deal with URIs (web browsers) don't know what to do with 
this scheme.  Tools that are used for exchange of information (e-mail 
clients) don't know what to do with them, either.

And we just happen to expect FITS readers to deal with them?  And bibcode? 
And whatever other ID schemes groups come up with in the future?

If you think my example is too impractical, write a DOI on a sheet of 
paper, and take it around to the scientists in your group, and ask them if 
they know what to do with it.

-Joe