Subject: FITS Indexing Proposal

From: pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov (William Pence)
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 18:00:57 -0400

FITS Indexing Proposal is Available for Comment
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Last year, representatives from several high-energy astrophysics
projects formed a small working group with the purpose of developing a
proposal for indexing of FITS tables, so that software that reads the
tables can more efficiently find any particular information of
interest.  A draft of this proposal is now available on the World Wide
Web at:

    http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/ofwg/indexing.html

This proposal is intended to be very general, and it may well be useful
to other groups that are interested in using indices to speed up access
to FITS tables.  Under this proposal, the index can be 1-dimensional or
2-dimensional (or higher) and is stored in a FITS binary table using a
small set of newly defined keywords and column names.

Any comments or suggestions regarding this proposal are welcome.

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William Pence (on behalf of the working group)