FITS-related WAIS Sources
The nrao-fits WAIS
server supports searches of all of the text files in the entire
FITS archive. "All" means everything -- READMEs, standards, drafts,
overviews, and all of the news and Email messages in the traffic
archive, even including the ASCII headers of the FITS sample and test
data files. All of the Postscript documents are in the index too. The
WAIS server enables users to search this huge mass of text for
instances of any strings.
Sample searches of the archive
-
standard -- FITS standards documents (the NASA FITS standard is
the first document returned).
- cdc
-- Discussions of the early history of FITS, of pre-FITS prototyping,
of the FITS 'birthday' and of 'icunabula'.
-
nost support -- Documents produced by the FITS Support Office at
the NOST [NASA/OSSA Office of Standards and Technology] at Goddard
Space Flight Center [GSFC].
- efc (was
"european") -- Reports of activities of the European FITS Committee
and Annual Reports of the Chair of the IAU FITS WG.
- ieee --
IEEE floating point numbers in FITS files, standards and discussions
of usage, expecially for VAXen.
-
bintable -- Documents and traffic related to the BINTABLE (Binary
Table) FITS extension type.
- exabyte
-- Discussions of blocking and tapemarks on exabytes and other
cartridge tapes, and of FITS blocking conventions.
- wcs -- World
Coordinate Systems -- documents discussing the semantics of describing
various projective geometries using FITS header syntax.
- ogip --
Documents related to the NASA HEASARC OGIP conventions for using the
FITS BINTABLE extension to interchange and archive high energy
astrophysics data.
- dish
spectra -- Discussions of use of FITS to encode sets of spectra,
especially for single-dish radio telescopes.
- units --
Discussions of physical units usage (e.g. SI vs. cgs).
-
continuation -- A May-1993 discussion of how to represent
character strings longer than 68 characters in FITS headers.
-
mac macos macintosh -- Discussions of FITS support for Macintosh
systems.
- skipped
-- Listings of headers of FITS sampledata and testfiles.
-
compress -- Discussions of use of data compression in astronomy,
especially in the FITS context.
Obtaining the WAIS "source" file
If you wish to talk to the server with your own xwais client (perhaps
in order to utilize relevance feedback), you can copy file
nrao-fits.src to your own wais-sources directory. Directory wais-sources
contains WAIS "source" files for other astronomy-related WAIS servers.
About WAIS
WAIS [Wide-Area Information Services] is the best developed and
most widely implemented text searching mechanism on the Internet. The
WAIS protocol is an adaptation of the ANSI Z39.50 standard protocol
which was developed for library catalog systems.
dwells@nrao.edu
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