Subject: Re: Requested use of this group for standards efforts

From: [email-masked] (Paul J Turner)
Date: 2 Aug 93 20:56:37 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Joel Plutchak) writes:
>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Briand T Sanderson) writes:
>>Here is the Official Charter for sci.data.formats:
[... stuff about the charter for sci.data.formats deleted]
>
>   Unfortunately, much of the traffic is not really on track, e.g.
>requests for routines to read Microsoft .WAV (sound) files on the Mac.
>Perhaps if the charter were posted every month or so, it would encourage
>use more consistent with the charter.
>   And how about a FAQ?  Anyone wanna volunteer to pull together
>something preliminary, e.g. descriptions of various scientific data
>formats, source for software tools, converters, etc?
>--
>Joel Plutchak, Research Programmer/Analyst
>"I'm mentally OVERDRAWN!"

There is a nice prototype for an FAQ in the '90 SIGGRAPH workshop report 
"Data Structures and Access Software for Scientific Visualization."
An updated electronic version of this would be a nice thing to have,
with additional data for AVS, IBM Data Explorer, SGI Explorer, etc.
There is mention in the report of a followup workshop in '91 but I've
not seen anything about this (not that I've looked very hard). 
The '90 report gives a nice listing of the kinds of things to look
for in a scientific data file format and allows a data-file-format-
shopper to do some comparison and contrast (perhaps, more importantly, 
lets the shopper know what is out there). I imagine the authors 
would have things to add and subtract from the list by now but it
would be a good starting point.

--Paul Turner - [email-masked]