Subject: FITS vs HDF

From: [email-masked] (John Bates)
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1993 17:27:47 GMT

Hi formats group, it's been fun to finally see some more lively discussion
on this group, even if it was the FITS folks having fits.  FITS lost
the EOS battle because of very good reasons.  As Steve Allen said,

>If HDF makes doing the work easier, then that is a significant advantage
>for it which FITS does not have.  This is especially true for graduate
>students or other sorts of projects which do not have the time to
>invent some kind of wrapper code that successfuly stores and retrieves
>their data structures. 

As an end user of nearly every operational satellite data set for the past 15 years, my research has been hampered most by inaccessable data sets.
This is because the anal retentive archivers of these data focussed
on their needs as an archiver of data NOT on the needs of the end
scientist doing work.  As an end user, I don't care where the bits are!
I care about where the data structures are.  So FITS folks, stop focussing on where the bits are, you are making my life more difficult.  And I don't
really care if it is the most efficient storage.  If scientists can't
easily get at the data structures, they won't use the data.  So
having the 'best' archive format is meaningless to me as an end user.
I want the most useful format for addressing science issues.  With all
the recent work at NCSA, I now feel confident that HDF is one of the most
useful formats for addressing science.

John Bates, NOAA Climate Research Center