Standardising units and formats (and ref frames?) in transmission

[Mark Taylor]

On Fri, 15 May 2009, Patrick Dowler wrote:

> Or they could all use STIL and Mark will have to do all the hard work.. sounds 
> like plan B :-)

I'd be more than happy to implement in STIL or some other library anything
which would help matters along these lines (as long as it's possible - 
magical algorithms which can correctly guess whether a column just 
labelled EPOCH is in TDB or UTC don't count).  But writing it is the 
easy bit - getting it deployed in a way which ensures that it's 
applied correctly to the data is much harder.  I'm not accusing data 
centres of being lazy or intransigent here, but even if the 'marketing' 
problems can be solved, there can be many site-specific barriers to 
simply slotting in a new bit of software.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/