VOEvent References

[Steve Allen]

On Mon 2011-03-21T18:32:04 +0000, Norman Gray hath writ:
> That perhaps indicates where the boundary is between @mimetype and
> @sciencetype -- it's at some boundary between the details of the
> interaction, and the meat-and-potatoes of the application.  In your
> example of a CelestiaObjectDescriptionFile, the important thing for
> the application is that this is a CelestiaObjectDescriptionFile.  It's
> not a simulation which just happens to be encoded in that format,
> which can therefore be abstracted away in the way that GIF vs PNG can
> be abstracted away -- the fact it's in that format is of significance
> to the meat-and-potatoes level of the application.

In the production of the FITS MIME RFC it became clear that we were
only able to document syntax and not semantics.

Type image/fits only says that there should be a data array, not
whether the data are from X-ray, radio, optical, simulation, or a
pocket camera which took a family portrait.

Type application/fits does not say, e.g., that the content might be a
bunch of tables in third-normal-form which describe the manufacture of
a slitmask that was used to acquire the spectra in the IMAGE extensions.

It became clear that the MIME media type could not advise on what sort
of things were to be done with the images and/or tables; it could not
say what was intended to be communicated by the file.  If that is to
be generally described by a FITS file then more conventions for
keywords are needed.  If specific cases are to be described by MIME
then a standards document defining those conventions can be used to
register a new MIME media type with semantics as well as syntax.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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