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

From: [email-masked] (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:      [email-masked]  
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From: [email-masked] (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1993 03:02:20 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>
[email-masked] (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
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Lee E. Brotzman)
Date: 22 Jun 93 18:33:02 GMT

[email-masked] (Greg Hennessy) writes:
># 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.

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.

>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? 

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.

>#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* 

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:  [email-masked]
-- Hughes STX                         DECNET:    NDADSA::BROTZMAN
-- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center   BITNET:    ZMLEB@GIBBS