On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Tony Linde wrote:
> There's a BinX format floating about from (I think) the grid world - and Guy
> told me about some DFDL (pronounced 'daffodil' apparently) which is a way of
> allowing xml-based tools to read binary format data. I don't know much more
> about it.
Just a minor update: BinX isn't so much a format as a library which allows arbitrary binary data to be described in standard XML. BinX can be used to describe a FITS file, for example (one of its design goals) and thereby transform it to some other format using XSL. More on it at http://www.edikt.org/binx/index.htm
DFDL stands for Data Format Description Language and is a GGF working group. More at http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/dfdl-wg/ One idea is that, eventually, it may be possible to search binary data using something like Xpath.
Also Arnold said earlier:
> > I'll repeat my old mantra (slightly disagreeing with what Clive said
> > earlier): FITS defined the syntax of the metadata but failed
> > to define the semantics - and that's turned out to have been
> > a considerable problem.
That is indeed the case - but I think it would be even more accurate to say that FITS defined all of the syntax but also some of the semantics. With hindsight one can see that the syntax was too inflexible (which XML solves) and the semantics very basic. It is indeed a considerable problem to fix the latter.
-- Clive Page Dept of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.Received on 2004-04-14Z16:19:07