Astronomy Visualization Metadata

Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) is a standard for tagging digital astronomical images stored in formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG and TIFF.[1] The AVM standard extends the concept of Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) headers to include useful astronomical information about the subject of the image as well as the telescope used to take the image. This ensures that relevant information is transferred with the image when it is shared with others. AVM could be considered analogous to the FITS headers associated with raw astronomical data files.

The standard was proposed by the Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project, part of the IAU Commission 55 and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. It reached version 1.1 on May 14, 2008.[2] The standard is currently used to tag images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Herschel Space Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble and the European Southern Observatory.[3] Software packages such as PinpointWCS,[4] FITS Liberator[5] and Microsoft WorldWide Telescope have implemented the standard.

The metadata include information about the creator of the image, the content (including description and subject category), the method of observation (including facility, instrument and spectral information), the World Coordinate System (WCS) position in the sky, and the publisher of the image.

AVM was conceived by Robert Hurt, Lars Lindberg Christensen, and Adrienne Gauthier.

Metadata Categories

The Astronomy Visualization Metadata standard defines a taxonomy for astronomical objects.[6] The main categories are:

  1. Planet
  2. Interplanetary Body
  3. Star
  4. Nebula
  5. Galaxy
  6. Cosmology
  7. Sky Phenomenon
  8. Technology
  9. People
gollark: Oh no.
gollark: Anyway, concrete, glass, urbanism and high-performance computing good; fields, isolated cottages and manually farming bad.
gollark: If you don't have an infographic for that I can't possibly believe it.
gollark: This would displease me. I dislike "cottagecore".
gollark: First aid is valid, but "helping friends with mental and emotional problems" sounds extremely hard to teach. Although I guess that also applies to independent learning and stuff, and the solution is probably to structure stuff such that it arises easily instead of trying to manually teach it.

References
  1. Astronomy Visualization Metadata Standard
  2. AVM 1.1 Final Candidate
  3. ESO Images in a Universal Context - Astronomical metadata to provide better access to space images
  4. PinpointWCS Archived August 11, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  5. FITS Liberator
  6. AVM 1.1 Final Candidate Appendix A
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.