ADASS Program Organizing Committee

1. Report on the IAU FITS Working Group meeting held in Sydney, July 2003 (A.Rots - 10 min.)
2. Preliminary goals for the IAU FITS Working Group (Pence 20 min.) Including:
   • Reconsider the role of the 3 regional FITS committees and their relationship to the IAUFWG in the era of the Virtual Observatory
   • Streamline the procedures for discussing and voting on new FITS proposals
   • Vote to make official the B.1 and B.2 appendixes in the NOST Standard dealing with variable length arrays and the TDIMn keyword
   • Establish a registry of FITS conventions that are in current wide-spread use
   • Establish a data dictionary of commonly used FITS keywords, beyond the keywords already defined in the FITS Standard and in the WCS papers
   • Update the FITS User's Guide (last revised in 1997)
   • Clean up and update FITS information on the Web
   • Consider when to convene a new panel to update the FITS Standard document (last changes approved in 1999)
3. Status and Discussion of World Coordinate System Papers III & IV (Valdes and Calabretta 20 min.)
4. Open discussion of any FITS-related subjects, as time permits.

This BoF session is connected to the poster paper by Dubernet et al. "Atomic and Molecular Physics Databases in the Virtual Observatories". Atomic and molecular databases are an example of distributed resources which are used in numerous astrophysical applications, in particular in the interpretation of spectra provided by space/ground based current and future instruments (HSO, ALMA, etc..). However, specific questions raised by the access to these databases in the VO paradigm have not yet been addressed. It is important to make atomic and molecular data widely available in interrelating databases with VO projects ; this would allow in particular uniqueness of data used in astrophysical models and automatic access to these data from web applications developed for spectrum analysis or modelling.

The aim of this BoF session is to gather people involved in atomic and molecular databases development or working with atomic and molecular data and concerned with interoperability matters; this is in order to:

• try to compile efforts which are already started in this domain;
• evaluate the needs, feasibility and requirements of the targeted interrelation of atomic and molecular data bases with VO projects;
• to establish collaborations and set up a group of persons which could act as a representative with VO projects

People who intend to attend the session will be able to find some useful information in English after October 1 at URL: http://wwwusr.obspm.fr/~vo-phys/PAGE-VO/main.html

The organizers will give a short presentation addressing what has been initiated in the french community and about the technical issues which have been tackled in the particular case of the collisional ro-vibrational molecular database (http://basecol.obs-besancon.fr) ; as a typical VO case, the question of the representation of molecular data in the VOTables framework will be discussed.

Participants are strongly encouraged to give short presentations about their own work related to atomic and molecular data bases interoperability or data dissemination ; a contact with the organizers of the session beforehand would improve the interest and ease the organization of the session.

A general discussion will follow which would hopefully result in the set up of a coordination structure whose aim has been described above.