[wfc] Call for Votes on WCS III

[Arnold Rots]

  Call for the North American FITS Committee Vote on WCS Paper III
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The FITS Regional Committees have been called upon to review and vote
on the FITS WCS III proposal "Representations of spectral coordinates
in FITS" by Greisen, Calabretta, Valdes, and Allen.  The latest draft
of the paper (20 May 2005) is available from Eric Greisen's web site
in postscript or PDF formats:

      http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.ps.gz
      http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.ps
      http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.pdf

A small revision to this paper was made just last week, so everyone should 
be sure to get a copy of the latest version for review.

The voting deadline is 14 June: your vote must be e-mailed to me
by 2005-06-14T23:59:59 (UTC).  At least 2/3 of the members must vote,
and at least 2/3 of those votes must be 'Yes' in order for the
committee to formally approve the paper.

Please return the ballot section below with one box checked.
Appended are some comments by Bill Pence on the voting process and the
nature of this paper.

Cheers,

  - Arnold

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Ballot
Proposal to incorporate the contents of the WCS III proposal, as
described in http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.pdf, into
the FITS Standard (choose 1):

  [ ]  Yes - I agree
  [ ]  No  - I disagree, because... (give reasons)
  [ ]  Abstain - I have no preference
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Here are a couple other brief comments about this process:

In addition to simply casting a vote, the committee members should be 
encouraged to provide any comments or suggestions they may have about this 
paper.  All comments will be considered by the IAU FITS Working Group before 
it conducts a final vote on the paper.

Because this paper is quite long and very technical, most reviewers cannot 
be expected to verify every statement in the paper before voting on it. 
Some members may even feel somewhat overwhelmed by the technical content of 
this paper and be tempted to vote "Abstain".  I would urge members to think 
carefully before doing this, however, because if more than 1/3 of the 
members vote to abstain, then the paper cannot be approved by the committee.

I would just hope that most committee members will at least read the first 
few sections in detail and than get a general understanding of the later 
sections.  Given that many of the technical experts in this subject matter 
have contributed to the development of this paper over the past 5 years or 
so, it is probably fairly safe to assume that there are no major factual or 
mathematical errors in the paper (the long development history of this paper 
can be reviewed in the archive of the postings to the fitswcs mail list, 
available at http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitswcs/).  Perhaps one 
area where the regional committee members could be most helpful is in 
checking that the paper is complete: are there any important issues or 
topics that are not adequately covered by the paper?


Bill Pence
-- 

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Arnold H. Rots                                Chandra X-ray Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
60 Garden Street, MS 67                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots at head.cfa.harvard.edu
USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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