Subject: IAU recommendations on 'Designations' (OBJECT values)

From: dwells at nrao.edu (Don Wells)
Date: 16 Feb 1995 20:08:11 GMT

Recently Helene Dickel (UIUC), who is Chair of the IAU (Commission 5)
Task Group on Designations, alerted me to the existence on the Web of
the most recent revision of the TG's recommended practice for source
names (OBJECT values). The title and URL are

    "Specifications concerning designations for astronomical radiation
                sources outside the solar system"
    http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/iau-spec.html

I have studied this document, and have concluded that the FITS
community should consider it for adoption as a recommended practice
for OBJECT values, in much the same spirit as our endorsement of the
IAU Style Manual recommendation of SI units. All members of the FITS
community who are interested in the strings that go into the value
fields of OBJECT keywords should read this document. Problems of
object identifications in data archives (and in the published
literature) will be reduced if these recommended practices are
followed in observatories.

Questions:

1) Have any observatories recommended to their observers that the IAU
rules be followed in entering source name strings (which become OBJECT
values)? Should all observatories do this?

2) Have any archives utilized or enforced these rules in any way?
Should archive systems do this?

3) Has anyone coded a parser to check conformance of strings to these
rules? Would such a tool be useful? 
--
  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA