[fitsbits] reopening of Public Comment Period on the Green Bank convention

[William Pence]

The paragraph of descriptive text about the Green Bank convention 
(http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/FITS/Conventions/greenbank-rev2.pdf) 
comes *verbatim* from the first World Coordinate System paper published 
by Greisen and Calibretta in 2002.  The IAU FITS Working Group voted 
unanimously to approve this paper in December 2002, so this text has 
been officially part of the FITS standard for more than 15 years.  It is 
a bit late to raise objections to this now.

This Green Bank convention was one of the primary agreements reached at 
an important meeting to discuss standard FITS formats for the 
interchange of single dish radio astronomy data held at Green Bank in 
1989.  I think it is fair to say that this agreement was historically 
significant in promoting FITS as the standard format for astronomical 
data.  Thus I think it is entirely appropriate to now recognize and 
document the Green Bank convention in the FITS standard document itself, 
for the benefit of future researchers.

-Bill

On 6/1/2016 5:39 AM, THIERRY FORVEILLE wrote:

>> On Wed, 25 May 2016, Tom McGlynn (NASA/GSFC Code 660.1) wrote:
>>
>>> I am strongly opposed to adopting this convention within the FITS
>>> standard although I think it is perfectly appropriate for projects to
>>> use as they wish.
>> This should be exactly the sense of the proposed text. The Green Bank
>> convention is already mentioned in the WCS papers, the WCS papers are part
>> of the standard "per incorporation", and the proposed text NOW does
>> nothing else that reporting a sentence from the WCS papers. So it simply
>> reaffirms the status quo.
>>
>> Therefore, unless more comments arise, I'd like to put it to a procedural
>> vote in IAU FWG next week.
>>
> Like Tom, I object to what seems to have become an implicit assumption that
> incorporating a convention into the standard is a good thing, as long as it
> has significant existing use. There are costs to extending the standard (unless,
> as Tom also says, one accepts that everybody uses cfitsio), and those need to
> be balanced against the benefits.
>
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