Subject: Server "nrao-fits" now in WAIS-Directory-of-Servers

From: dwells at fits.CV.NRAO.EDU (Don Wells)
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1993 21:39:34 GMT

(:source 
   :version  3 
   :ip-address "192.33.115.8"
   :ip-name "fits.cv.nrao.edu"
   :tcp-port 210
   :database-name "nrao-fits"
   :cost 0.00 
   :cost-unit :free 
   :maintainer "dwells at fits.cv.nrao.edu"
   :description "Server created with WAIS release 8 b5 on Jun 15 21:51:49 1993 by dwells at fits.cv.nrao.edu

		    WAIS Server for FITS Documents

Host fits.cv.nrao.edu [192.33.115.8] supports an anonymous-FTP archive
for the Flexible Image Transport System [FITS], the standard data
interchange and archival format of the worldwide astronomy community.
The archive includes a variety of documents in directory
/fits/documents, discussions of FITS support for various operating
systems in directory /fits/os-support, binary test files in
directories /fits/sampledata and /fits/testfiles, and FITS-related
newsgroup and exploder traffic in the directory /fits/traffic.

Fits.cv.nrao.edu also supports a WAIS server which indexes all of the
text files in the archive, including those coded in Postscript. I
tabulate some sample WAIS searches below; the best documents returned
by these keys can be used to refine the WAIS searches using relevance
feedback.

Key(s)		Fetches:
--------------- ------------------------------------------------------
standard	FITS standards documents (the NASA FITS standard is
		the first document returned).

ron 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].

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	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.
"
)

--

  Donald C. Wells           Associate Scientist       dwells at nrao.edu
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road                              Fax= +1-804-296-0278
  Charlottesville, Virginia 22903-2475 USA         78:31.1W, 38:02.2N

---

From: gsh7w at fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1993 02:17:32 GMT

Don Wells writes:
#		    WAIS Server for FITS Documents
#Host fits.cv.nrao.edu [192.33.115.8] supports an anonymous-FTP archive
#for the Flexible Image Transport System [FITS], the standard data
#interchange and archival format of the worldwide astronomy community.

Thanks Don.

I note that there are several postscript files. I did a quick and
dirty hack to kludge a ~/bin/wais-ps-display file to invoke
ghostscript on these, and it almost sorta worked, but it quickly
scrolled by faster than could read. I could move to a slower
workstation, but was wondering if anyone knew a way to have
ghostscript wait for a carriage return to move to the nextpage.

Don, I also note that you only catalog the text files, and I know that
there are lots of fits images floating on your machine, esp on the
CD-rom system you have. What are your thought of putting these
available through wais, so people can invoke saoimage on these files?
Or would it be too much bandwidth for the machine, and network, to
handle? 

Greg
--
-Greg Hennessy, University of Virginia
 USPS Mail:     Astronomy Department, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475 USA
 Internet:      gsh7w at virginia.edu  
 UUCP:		...!uunet!virginia!gsh7w

---

From: marca at ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1993 03:02:20 GMT

In article <C8sp18.5Eu at murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
gsh7w at fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes:

Use the 'ghostview' front-end for ghostscript, which provides a fairly
nice user interface, including full page control.  prep.ai.mit.edu in
/pub/gnu...

Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca at ncsa.uiuc.edu

---

From: dwells at fits.CV.NRAO.EDU (Don Wells)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1993 14:36:51 GMT

GH> Thanks Don.

You are welcome, Greg. The person you should really thank is Archie
Warnock. He has pioneered and advocated the WAIS technology in
astronomical applications as a part of the STELAR project at NASA. He
has assisted me in several ways; e.g.  the executables of my server
and indexer were linked by him. Archie has established a directory of
astronomy-related WAIS servers on host hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov, and I
recommend that copies of new astronomy-related WAIS source files be
sent to him. Mine was included in the NASA directory two weeks before
I registered it at the master directory at think.com.

 GH> I note that there are several postscript files. I did a quick and 
 GH> dirty hack.. to invoke ghostscript on these.. it almost.. worked..

Wonderful! I asked Archie about the Postscript files when I was
developing my server, and he recommended that I include them to
permit the kind of experimentation which you have done.

 GH> .. I.. note that you only catalog the text files.. there are lots
 GH> of FITS images.. on your machine.. What are your thought of
 GH> [making] these available through WAIS, so people can invoke
 GH> saoimage on these files?..   

I could certainly command the waisindex program to include the names
of the binary files in the index, but I am unsure how to tag them as
type "FITS" so that your client could invoke the appropriate display
tool; WAIS has a rich set of object types, but the set doesn't (yet)
include FITS.

In my opinion the appropriate technology for this application is not
WAIS but WWW, the World-Wide-Web. Most people know the Web through the
name of its most sophisticated client implementation, xmosaic from
NCSA at UIUC. WAIS is an excellent means for discovering relevant
*text* documents using keywords, and fetching those documents; WAIS is
less well suited for dealing with non-textual material. WWW is an
excellent means for using hypertext links in text documents to point
at objects of arbitrary type. The links (called URLs [Universal
Resource Locators] in WWW jargon) can code the object type, and many
existing examples of WWW documents include pointers to digital image
files in various formats. I expect that it will be easy to get object
type "FITS" registered in the WWW community.

It appears to me that WAIS and WWW are complementary. The biggest
problem in using the Web is finding the hypertext page that points to
the resources you want. Once you find the first page it is easy to
find more relevant pages and to invoke arbitrary processes to do
arbitrary things to arbitrary objects.  Finding things in text (like
home pages) is what WAIS does best! The xmosaic WWW client already
talks to WAIS servers as well as WWW servers, and and so it appears to
me that it should be straight-forward for the WWW community to create
a symbiotic relationship between the two protocols.

I am watching the WWW technology closely, and I expect that before the
end of 1993 I will activate a Web server on fits.cv.nrao.edu, with the
"home page" being the master READ.ME file of the existing anonymous
FTP server. Anyone who finds my anonFTP server using WAIS or Archie,
and who is also an xmosaic (WWW) user, will spot the URLs appearing in
the document(s), and will copy them into their own documents and "hot
lists", and soon the world-wide Web will have many pointers to my Web
server. 

This is an exciting time for people who care about the classical
resource discovery problem --- practical solutions (Archie, Gopher,
WAIS, WWW) are already in hand, and the further development and
integration of these solutions is making rapid progress.
--

---

From: gsh7w at fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1993 14:15:56 GMT

Don Wells writes:
#You are welcome, Greg. The person you should really thank is Archie
#Warnock.

Of course. I've mentioned to Archie before how useful I find WAIS to
be in my work, so a public kudo seems in order. 

# GH> .. I.. note that you only catalog the text files.. there are lots
# GH> of FITS images.. on your machine.. What are your thought of
# GH> [making] these available through WAIS, so people can invoke
# GH> saoimage on these files?..   
#
#I could certainly command the waisindex program to include the names
#of the binary files in the index, but I am unsure how to tag them as
#type "FITS" so that your client could invoke the appropriate display
#tool; WAIS has a rich set of object types, but the set doesn't (yet)
#include FITS.

How does it tag Postscript? *I* knew the files were postscript by the
*.ps extensions. I would expect, based on a thread a few months ago in
sci.astro.fits, that a *.fit extension would imply FITS. Does WAIS
allow arbitrary types? I simply guess at what format to edit the shell
script ~/bin/wais-ps-display, and the Xwais.ad file, and my guess was
correct. Does WAIS know about Postscript? 

#In my opinion the appropriate technology for this application is not
#WAIS but WWW, the World-Wide-Web. 

Well, I haven't tried WWW, but have tried WAIS. My main point these
days is to finish my thesis, not try nifty new software packages.  At
least there is a WAIS server running a quarter mile from me now,
available for experimentation, while there is not a WWW server.
*hint hint*

---

From: dwells at fits.CV.NRAO.EDU (Don Wells)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1993 20:12:37 GMT

In article <DWELLS.93Jun18093651 at fits.cv.nrao.edu>
    dwells at fits.cv.nrao.edu (Don Wells) writes: [a followup about WAIS
    and WWW after Greg Hennessy asked whether WAIS could be used to
    fetch and display FITS files]
Archie Warnock sent me the following response by Email:
------- Start of forwarded message -------
Message-Id: <9306181743.AA08731 at Hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov>
From: warnock at Hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov (Archie Warnock)
To: dwells at fits.CV.NRAO.EDU (Don Wells)
Subject: Re:  Server "nrao-fits" now in WAIS-Directory-of-Servers
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 93 13:43:02 EDT

> Warnock. He has pioneered and advocated the WAIS technology in

Awww, shucks <blushing>.  Thanks for the kind words.  My news poster
isn't working right now, but you can forward this to the net if you feel
like it.

> permit the kind of experimentation which you have done.

And I still haven't gotten our PS viewer working on hypatia yet, so I'm
kinda flying blind.  Someday, in my copious free time...

> tool; WAIS has a rich set of object types, but the set doesn't (yet)

You have but to ask :-)

Try this (or something close):

waisindex -d (wherever) -T FITS -t filename -a -export -r (all your FITS files)

- -T forces the indexer to tag the files as type FITS, and the file name
only will be indexed.  I already did this with HTML documents - tag them
as HTML, index the text contents and set up xmosaic as the HTML viewer.

This allows WAIS to index arbitrary data formats (how's that for a group
tie-in?), without having specific knowledge of them.  As long as they're
appropriately tagged, and as long as your client knows what to do with
them, it works fine.

> name of its most sophisticated client implementation, xmosaic from

I still tend to think of WAIS as the discovery tool and WWW/xmosaic as
the retrieval/display tool.

> *text* documents using keywords, and fetching those documents; WAIS is
                         ^^^^^^^^

I _hate_ to see this!  "Keywords" carries a different meaning in most
contexts, and it frequently leads to confusion.  "Keywords?  We don'
need no stinking keywords".  WAIS index the _contents_ of documents,
whatever that might be, and the user enters English phrases, not
keywords.  You and I may know that the retrieval engine, because it just
matches words between query and document, is essentially "keyword-like",
but Brewster's mom doesn't.  Seriously, many users carry preconceptions
of what "keyword" means, and it's something other than what WAIS does.

> excellent means for using hypertext links in text documents to point

Actually, what WWW lets you do is hook objects of arbitrary type to you
documents instead of forcing the user to go looking for them.  OTOH,
waisindex will index the (always-intelligently-named) file names just
fine (which I did with my sample HST data server), and it indexes header
data just fine, knowing to stop at the first non-ASCII character, so
it'll work on FITS and PDS files (which I've also done).

> type "FITS" registered in the WWW community.

There's a thought...

> home pages) is what WAIS does best! The xmosaic WWW client already

As I mentioned above, this works just fine - I've already tried it.
What we need is more WAIS indexes of HTML documents registered with
Directory-of-servers. 

> a symbiotic relationship between the two protocols.

Absolutely - they really fit together very well.  As soon (!) as NCSA
builds in native WAIS support to xmosaic, rather than requiring a
gateway server (which really isn't all that much of a hassle, either),
it'll look quite seamless.

> "home page" being the master READ.ME file of the existing anonymous

I expect it'll be sooner than that.  Ours is running already, and it
seems fine.  I'm building a soon-to-be public home page for STELAR with
hooks to our databases, our anonymous FTP site and to some of the
NSSDC's on-line services.  Coming soon to a Web near you...

> resource discovery problem --- practical solutions (Archie, Gopher,

That's archie the program, not Archie the person :-)

> integration of these solutions is making rapid progress.

Yes, yes, yes.  This really is revolutionizing the way in which we find
the information we use to do our science.

Archie
_______________________________________________________________________
- -- Archie Warnock              Internet:  warnock at hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov
- -- Hughes STX                  "Unix --- JCL For The 90s"
- -- NASA/GSFC                   Project STELAR: WAIS to do science

------- End of forwarded message -------
--

---

From: emv at garnet.msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
Date: 19 Jun 1993 20:14:01 GMT

Don Wells (dwells at fits.cv.nrao.edu) wrote:

: I could certainly command the waisindex program to include the names
: of the binary files in the index, but I am unsure how to tag them as
: type "FITS" so that your client could invoke the appropriate display
: tool; WAIS has a rich set of object types, but the set doesn't (yet)
: include FITS.

The right place to go to register new file data types is the 
"Internet Assigned Numbers Authority", which keeps track of such
things for file content types for multi-media mail (MIME) and
also for other applications programs that are using the MIME
typing system as a standard way of naming things.  Registration
involves coming up with a reference to a printed spec, an analysis
of the security implications of mailing such things around (do
FITS documents have code in them that could instruct a viewer to
do an "rm -rf /" ?), and any notes to encodings it the data formats
are not 7-bit ascii.

  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv at Msen.com
Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 4562 (fax: 998 4563)

---

From: marca at ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1993 02:16:45 GMT

In article <DWELLS.93Jun18093651 at fits.cv.nrao.edu>
dwells at fits.cv.nrao.edu (Don Wells) writes:

   In my opinion the appropriate technology for this application is
   not WAIS but WWW, the World-Wide-Web. Most people know the Web
   through the name of its most sophisticated client implementation,
   xmosaic from NCSA at UIUC. WAIS is an excellent means for
   discovering relevant *text* documents using keywords, and fetching
   those documents; WAIS is less well suited for dealing with
   non-textual material. WWW is an excellent means for using hypertext
   links in text documents to point at objects of arbitrary type. The
   links (called URLs [Universal Resource Locators] in WWW jargon) can
   code the object type, and many existing examples of WWW documents
   include pointers to digital image files in various formats. I
   expect that it will be easy to get object type "FITS" registered in
   the WWW community.

Now that you mention it, I'll make sure the next version of Mosaic
will be able to handle FITS data.

A side note: readers of this group may be interested to know that
future versions of Mosaic will be able to browse HDF and netCDF data
files -- accessing such a file will present you with a hypermedia
description and interface to its structure and contents.  For more
information, including screen dumps, see this document:

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/hdf-browsing.html

...within Mosaic (ftp to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic if you're not
already running it).

Cheers,
Marc

---

From: leb at Hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov (Lee E. Brotzman)
Date: 22 Jun 93 18:33:02 GMT

>#tool; WAIS has a rich set of object types, but the set doesn't (yet)

Actually, Jim Fullton, of the Clearinghouse for Network Information Discovery
and Retrieval (CNIDR) had implemented a FITS file index and server for WAIS
while he was at the University of North Carolina.  The stock indexer has a neat
little feature of stopping whenever it hits binary, non-ASCII, data.  So you
can index the files pretty easily.  Just don't expect to get much information
back by querying about "NAXIS".  :-)

It isn't very hear to add the datatype tagging and "headline" code to the
indexer (a headline is the one-line textual description you get back from an
initial query).  It might take a little more effort to make a general headline
checker for FITS that is geared to a specific keyword or keywords, but in
general the task is nearly trivial.  That's why I like this stuff so much.

>correct. Does WAIS know about Postscript? 

The datatype of a document is indexed along with the document and held by the
server.  There is a field in the RequestResponse APDU returned to your client
that gives the datatype(s) of that document.  An important feature is that a
document can have multiple datatypes.  This is how project STELAR works.  We
indexed the abstracts for the text searches and logically tied them together
with the scanned pages from the articles within the server.  When you click on
an abstract title, xwais asks you if you want to see the abstract, first page
TIFF file, or all the TIFF files in the article.  Real slick and built right
out of the box with just a li-i-i-tle tweaking.

>available for experimentation, while there is not a WWW server.

If you try WWW, you'll want to write your thesis about *it*, it's that cool.
Remember that we are in the global network community, and in client server
applications it doesn't matter a bit if the server is down the road or across
the nation.  Maybe it matters a little if it's overseas, but not nearly as much
as it once did.

--
-- Lee E. Brotzman                    Internet:  leb at hypatia.gsfc.nasa.gov
-- Hughes STX                         DECNET:    NDADSA::BROTZMAN
-- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center   BITNET:    ZMLEB at GIBBS