Greetings,
I've just been involved in a discussion in another forum about UCDs, and their general desirability as metadata keywords (in fact it was in the context of the keywords to be extracted by a putative FITS plugin for MacOS X 10.4's Spotlight -- extremely nice). I was trying to discourage folk from using FITS keywords as general metadata, and encourage them to use UCDs instead.
As part of this, I produced a set of UCD equivalents for a candidate list of FITS keywords. There were some gaps, however, and I wasn't sure how to go about filling them. Is there a better way than looking through the one-line descriptions in the current list at <http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/UCD/ucd1p-words.txt>? There are two UCD tree browsers on the UCD page, of course, but they're really just a more attractive presentation of the text list and don't, for example, have more discursive documentation. The other UCD tools didn't produce any useful suggestions for `BITPIX' or `number of axes'
What would be _really_ nice, of course, is a tool which allowed you to enter one of a subset of FITS keywords and produced one of a few possible UCDs to use instead.
So my question is, am I missing something (much more likely than I wish it were)? Such a thing would require an injection of Copious Free Time, of course, but I found myself in a rather awkward place, recommending UCDs over FITS keywords, to an audience which is familiar with FITS, but for whom the UCD list is opaque and rather thinly documented.
All the best,
Norman
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Norman Gray : Physics & Astronomy, Glasgow University, UK http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/ : www.starlink.ac.ukReceived on 2005-05-03Z14:19:01