Subject: Re: Office Document Architecture ISO 8613

From: dwells at fits.cx.nrao.edu (Don Wells)
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1991 23:11:53 GMT

In article <19879 at darkstar.ucsc.edu> sla at helios.ucsc.edu (Steve Allen)
writes:
 SA> Summary: FITS become obsolete?  I doubt it.
 SA> Keywords: Commercial Image Standards
 SA> 
 SA> [In] Message-ID: <18929 at venera.isi.edu> rogers at wlf.isi.edu (Craig 
 SA> Milo Rogers) [says:]
 SA> CMR> To a large extent, TIFF, FITS, and other such standards will
 SA> CMR> be obsolete if one of the newer Office Document Architecture
 SA> CMR> standards, such as ISO 8613, becomes commercially successful.
 SA> 
 SA> I wonder if the author of the above knows anything about FITS.

His words suggests that he thinks FITS is only a syntax for
transmitting screendumps of 8-bit bytes. Also, the quoted remark
doesn't address the issues of (1) ancillary information and (2)
semantics of scientific data.

 SA> Does anyone in the astro community know anything about ISO 8613?

I recently read a discussion of ODA by somebody at DEC. It sounded
like discussions of SGML to some extent. It also sounded like
discussions of X.400 and other "multi-media [E]mail" techniques.
There are commercial products in this area, but it is unclear whether
any of these things are truly "commercially successful" yet. They are
schemes for encapsulating non-textual data objects inside a
"document", in a more graceful fashion than, e.g., injecting a "Fig"
drawing into a LaTeX document with a \special to give instruction to
dvi2ps. In the sense that such documents can encapsulate a spreadsheet
(table) as well as an image (matrix) plus arbitrary text (ancillary
information), there is an element of truth in the assertion by Rogers,
but it appears to me that document architecture folk will need to do a
lot more R&D before they can capture the market for archival
representation of scientific data.

Because such "document" architectures can encapsulate a variety of
data structures, and are extensible, they could encapsulate FITS
bytestreams within documents. BUT!! Because the FITS architecture can
encapsulate a variety of data structures as generalized extensions,
and is extensible, FITS could encapsulate any other types of
bytestreams (e.g., ODA) within FITS files. 
--

Donald C. Wells             Associate Scientist        dwells at nrao.edu
National Radio Astronomy Observatory                   +1-804-296-0277
Edgemont Road                                     Fax= +1-804-296-0278
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