[fitsmime] FITS Mime-Types for Mosaics

[William Thompson]

My own thoughts on this are that "image/fits" and any "image/fits-..." should be
reserved for FITS images which one could expect to be loaded into a generic
image viewing program (such as XV or LVIEW) which also handles other image types
such as GIF and JPEG.  To my mind, scientific processing, such as forming a
mosaic out of a series of images, is not appropriate for the "image/..." MIME
type.

MIME types should also be restricted to only those types which have been
officially recognized by the IAU, i.e. single HDU, random groups, and the
extensions IMAGE, TABLE, and BINTABLE.  Conventions used by specific projects
should not be incorporated until they're recognized by the IAU.

Personally, I think that the concentration should be on defining two mime types,
one for 2D images (image/fits), and another as a catch-all for FITS as a whole
(application/fits).  I don't really see much utility in types such as
"application/fits-bintable" since the internal structure can be so different
from file to file.  My binary tables are probably completely different from
yours.  (On the other hand, I could see that the MIME types
"application/fits-group", "application/fits-table", and "application/fits-image"
might have some utility.)

I don't know how I would handle a file with the mime type
"application/fits-mosaic", unless there were a universally recognized way of
encoding such data.  There's certainly nothing in the FITS documentation listing
such a standard.  I can personally think of three different ways of encoding
mosaics within FITS files.

William Thompson


William Joye wrote:
> 
> It has come to my attention that we have a need to handle a new case, one where
> there is one FITS file, with many extensions, that together form a mosaic image,
> and is to be loaded as such.
> 
> My first pass at this problem would be a new mime-type (since it is not an
> encoding issue) of something like:
> 
> image/fits-mosaic
> 
> this would fit in well with the existing proposed mime-types... comments?
> 
> Bill Joye
> wjoye at cfa.harvard.edu
> Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
> Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
> 
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