From: <mcalabre_at_email.protected>
Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 11:32:13 +1000

Greetings,

I advised last October that WCS Paper III was coming up for review.
After having been sidetracked for some months due to other business
the FITS regional committees are now being asked to vote on the
proposal - Bill Pence's email is appended, please read it carefully.

I would like to stress that you are not required to check the
mathematics! - although of course you may if you wish. The main thing
is to consider whether the proposal is sufficient to describe any
spectral coordinate system that you are familiar with or are likely to
use in future.

Could I have your votes by 2005/06/14 please. Just "Yes", "No" or
"Abstain" is sufficient, but comments are welcome and reasons should be
provided for "No" votes.

(Note that you may find a slightly later version of the paper than
2005/05/20 on Eric Greisen's or my web site with a few insignificant
typographical corrections.)

Cheers, Mark

------- Forwarded Message

Date: Mon 2005/05/23 15:25:01 -0400
From: William Pence <William.D.Pence_at_nasa.<!--nospam-->gov>
To: IAU-FITS Exec Committee <iaufec_at_nrao.<!--nospam-->edu>
CC:
Subject: [Iaufec] Call for regional committee votes on WCS III

    Call for Regional FITS Committee Votes on WCS Paper III

As we agreed a couple weeks ago, the 4 regional FITS committees should now
begin their formal review and vote on the World Coordinate Systems paper
III, entitled "Representations of spectral coordinates in FITS" by Greisen,
Calabretta, Valdes, and Allen. The latest draft of the paper (20 May 2005)
is available from Eric Greisen's web site in postscript or PDF formats:

      http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.ps.gz
      http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.ps
      http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen/scs_050520.pdf

A small revision to this paper was made just last week, so everyone should
be sure to get a copy of the latest version for review.

Each chairman should set an appropriate voting deadline for their committee
(nominally 3 weeks from the 'Call for Votes' announcement). According to
our recently revised rules, members may express their level of approval of
for paper by voting "Yes", "No", or "Abstain". At least 2/3 of the members
must vote, and at least 2/3 of those votes must be 'Yes' in order for the
committee to formally approve the paper.

Here are a couple other brief comments about this process:

In addition to simply casting a vote, the committee members should be
encouraged to provide any comments or suggestions they may have about this
paper. All comments will be considered by the IAU FITS Working Group before
it conducts a final vote on the paper.

Because this paper is quite long and very technical, most reviewers cannot
be expected to verify every statement in the paper before voting on it.
Some members may even feel somewhat overwhelmed by the technical content of
this paper and be tempted to vote "Abstain". I would urge members to think
carefully before doing this, however, because if more than 1/3 of the
members vote to abstain, then the paper cannot be approved by the committee.

I would just hope that most committee members will at least read the first
few sections in detail and than get a general understanding of the later
sections. Given that many of the technical experts in this subject matter
have contributed to the development of this paper over the past 5 years or
so, it is probably fairly safe to assume that there are no major factual or
mathematical errors in the paper (the long development history of this paper
can be reviewed in the archive of the postings to the fitswcs mail list,
available at http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitswcs/). Perhaps one
area where the regional committee members could be most helpful is in
checking that the paper is complete: are there any important issues or
topics that are not adequately covered by the paper?

Bill Pence
- --
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence William.D.Pence_at_nasa.<!--nospam-->gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662 HEASARC +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771 +1-301-286-1684 (fax)

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------- End of Forwarded Message
Received on 2005-05-24 11:32:35