[fitswcs] Re: WCS activity

[Patrick Wallace]

Hi Mark,


While accepting much of what you've been saying, and of course recognizing
your frustration, I want to put in a word of support for Don.  I know from
some of my own IAU standards activities that it is extremely hard to make
progress when all the key players are (a) volunteers, and (b) extremely
busy on "paid" work.  Sure, the Chair can make worthy announcements of
opportunity, and conduct formal voting in line with an agreed schedule,
but unless an active community of expert practitioners is pushing the
process forward you will get bad decisions.  So I favour Don's Model B,
even though it is not as certain to produce timely decisions as Model A.  
Incidentally, I have sometimes been told that any decision is better than
no decision.  In the case of FITS, I disagree.  The only standard that
counts is the one people are using.

In my opinion, the role of the Chair is primarily to be an enabler.  The
Chair tries to bring about circumstances in which agreement is reached
and formal ratification is achieved.  The Chair can't force the process to
occur.  (How would he?  By *ordering* people to respond?)  Monitoring and
encouraging what is going on in the community (e.g. in the FITS group) is
an important part of this enabling process, and it isn't always
appropriate or efficient (I have found) to involve everyone at every stage
of every discussion.

Be assured that your WCS proposals are well-known and are influencing
software design, so it's not as if you wrote them and then nothing
happened to benefit astronomy.  For example the FITS headers that are
automatically generated by the Gemini instruments contain fully
Calabretta-&-Greisen-compliant WCS keywords (likewise in applications
provided for amateur use by Software Bisque, I happen to know).  So the
draft WCS standard is doing a lot of what it was intended to do, and has
been doing so for years.

The central problem is that the WCS proposals are (necessarily) complex,
and the number of people in a position to make a useful contribution to
the debate is small.  I suppose you could say that the silent majority are
waiting to see which parts of the WCS design actually work out in
practice before they cast their votes.

One approach might be to establish a review panel as a subgroup of the
FITS WG, committed to meet physically at least once a year and limited to
individuals who have explicit funding for a specified and significant
amount of FITS effort.  This would force discussion, identify at least one
group prepared to take responsibility, and generate a natural timebase.  
But I for one am not confident of obtaining such funding, and I fear a lot
of others who want to contribute are in a similar position.

Because I don't want to get flamed more than necessary, I'll end by
stressing my personal appreciation for the enormous amounts of energy and
patience that you and Eric have put into developing the present WCS
designs.  And I think you should submit them for publication within this
calendar year, come what may.

regards


Patrick Wallace
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Starlink/HMNAO                                  Internet:  ptw at star.rl.ac.uk
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