Draft note for the annotation of plate scans

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Apps, Dear DM,

There are several projects to scan glass plates and other
observations from before the age of the CCD, and quite a few more
have already been finished.  These projects by and large ad-libbed
the FITS headers for their scans -- which includes me, for a few sets
of scans I'm publishing.

That is why I was very happy when I saw a relatively principled
approach to the problem of annotating scanned (direct-ish, meaning
this isn't really suitable for scanned spectra) astronomical
photographs by Taavi Tuvikene and colleagues in the context of the
APPLAUSE project (ivo://www.plate-archive.org/tap).

In cooperation with the original authors, I have turned this proposal
into a draft for an IVOA Note.  A rendered version of that draft is
at <http://docs.g-vo.org/plateheaders.pdf>, and you can pull the
source (PRs welcome!) from
<https://github.com/msdemlei/plateheaders.git>.

So...

* I'm not even sure that the IVOA is the right forum for this kind
  of thing, and much less which WG would look at it.  But then this is
  about interoperability of astronomical data, and I wouldn't know of
  a more appropriate forum.  So... does anyone feel I should better
  go elsewhere with this?

* Right now, I'm writing "Data Model" as WG, but as this is a Note, it
  could as well be "No group", and as it's, really, mainly about
  certain guarantees for applications, one could even argue it could
  be Apps.  So -- do people have preferences?  Does anyone feel this
  had better not be within the DM group?

* And of course: If you have thoughts on these conventions, I'd very
  much like to hear them.


Thanks,

          Markus