[fitswcs] WCS Paper III approved

[Mark Calabretta]

On Thu 2005/08/18 22:24:43 +0100, "Malcolm J. Currie" wrote
in a message to: William Pence <William.D.Pence at nasa.gov>
and copied to: fitswcs <fitswcs at nrao.edu>

>> I realise I am reacting rather late, but I find that the multi-dimensional
>> -TAB does not really belong with the rest of the paper. It is undoubtly
>> useful, but it has very little to do with spectral coordinates. If it were
>> a simple  addition I would not worry about that, but by itself it is
>> responsible for  about half the complexity of the paper which is not
>> simple.
>
>Is this a question over the implementation, or the need for such a
>facility, or the fact that it was postponed and should have appeared in
>Paper I?  I think it's the last but if it's the second, I disagree.

-LOG, -TAB, CNAMEia, and perhaps also the general mathematical method
described in Sect. 3, are all quite comfortably Paper I issues, so
if/when the WCS standard is ever collated into a NOST-like document it
would make sense to depart from the historical order.

Regarding -TAB, it may be timely to mention that I have completed the
high-level implementation in WCSLIB 4.1, which I hope to release soon,
and I also plan to present a poster on that subject at ADASS.  The
WCSLIB implementation includes a complicated test file that contains a
3-D data cube with four coordinate axes, two described by a 2-D table
and the remaining two by 1-D tables in a separate bintable extension.
It is also meant to serve as a fully-fleshed-out example of -TAB usage,
in addition to, but based partly on those in the Paper III.

Mark Calabretta
ATNF