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

[Lucio Chiappetti]

ANNOUNCEMENT:  START OF FORMAL PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD

This is to announce the official reopening of a formal Public Comment 
Period to recognize and mention the Green Bank convention in the FITS 
Standard document,

A previous PCP was held in June-July (started on 19 Jun 2015).

We are now re-opening the Public Comment Period to report the situation 
before passing to a vote to modify the standard document.

The Green Bank convention allows to expand a kewyord in a table column (or 
collapse a column with identical values in a keyword).

During the previous PCP, different opinions were expressed towards the 
original proposal, which aimed to *incorporate* in the standard the Green 
Bank convention, originally mentioned in the WCS papers, in a section or 
cross reference in chapter 7,

Since the main idea was to simply *document* the existence of the 
historically significant Green Bank convention in the FITS Standard, we 
are now just falling back to the exact wording that was used in the WCS 
paper, which implies NO CHANGE to the standard.

The proposed text consists of the paragraph in green in section 8,2 as 
presented in the draft at this link 
http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/FITS/Conventions/greenbank-rev2.pdf

The text contains in the second page also an excerpt of Appendix H.3, 
which now makes clear the Green Bank convention remains a registered 
convention, which is recognized by the standard.

Since the IAU FWG has already approved the WCS papers as part of the FITS 
Standard in 2003, and we are just inserting in the main document a bit of 
text from a WCS paper (section 3.6 of WCS paper I), this is just an 
EDITORIAL change, and as such will require just a plain procedural vote.

Please review the text carefully and post any comments, criticisms, or 
suggestions on the FITSBITS mailing list.

Supporting material for the PREVIOUS public comment period announcement 
can be retrieved from the FITSBITS archives starting from 
https://listmgr.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitsbits/2015-June/002620.html

==================================================================

The reopened Public Comment Period starts today 25 May 2016 and will 
last until 5 June 2016, unless extensions are requested and motivated.

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
for IAU FWG (prorogated)