Hi folks,
On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Tony Linde wrote:
> Found links:
Both these have been mentioned on this list before. Neither BinX nor DFDL are binary formats, as such, but rather ways of describing binary formats.
BinX is an XML language for describing binary data files. It was developed by the edikt project, based at the National e-Science Centre here in Edinburgh. I've been working with the edikt team on this and, as I've noted on this list before, we've got FITS bintable<->VOTable conversion working through BinX (as well as it can, given the differences between them).
DFDL is meant to be a generalisation of BinX to describe *all* data formats, not just binary ones: one of the problems we found with using BinX to translate between FITS and VOTable was that it couldn't handle the ASCII FITS headers without an additional processing step.
The ethos behind DFDL is that we (for any community "we") won't settle on a single data format, but we might settle on a single way of describing data formats, and then we can translate between them.
As I've noted on this list before, there's a long-standing action on me to write a note on BinX for the AstroGrid wiki. I've still not done it, but still intend to email this list once I have.
cheers
Bob Received on 2004-04-14Z16:21:40