Filenames in accref

[Petr Skoda]

Dear all,

I suppose you have had to ask a  similar questions while creating your 
own VO service - so please all suggestions are welcome!

We are going to change our format for spectra filenames as the current 
format was intented many years ago as DOS (8.3) compatible and now we are 
facing problem similar to Y2K ;-) in our case Y2016.
To keep name short but verbose we have used format YMddnnnn.fit
where Y was year as letter after 1990 (a=1990, b=1991 ...) and M letter of 
index of month (a=Jan, 2=Feb ....)  dd - night of observatiton and nnnn 
index of exposure that night (since first).

As the 2016 will need z we need to develop new scheme soon.
People want to make it verbose but I suppose some suggestions like

"2012-02.25_0012.fit" or "a201202250012.fit" or "2012-02-25_0012.fit"

(Some letter is suggested as a configuration of detector and camera etc 
..)

might introduce some troubles with separators in older applications, other 
operating systems or database handling.

As I understand the filename could be good base for creating pubid or 
creatorID or some derived values as well as it needs to be stored in 
databases - e.g. for SSA accref.

Even if everything could be escaped in principle, I guess there might be 
some sound rule how to create such a names to be easily reused in VO 
databases, Votables, accref fields etc and probably it is better to avaid 
some delimiters.

Could you comment on this - and help us to avoid surprizes or weird bugs ?

Petr Skoda


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*  Petr Skoda                         Phone : +420-323-649201, ext. 361 *
*  Stellar Department                         +420-323-620361           *
*  Astronomical Institute AS CR       Fax   : +420-323-620250           *
*  251 65 Ondrejov                    e-mail: skoda at sunstel.asu.cas.cz  *
*  Czech Republic                                                       *
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