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Vatican Chooses Open FITS Image Format

Posted by timothy on from the wouldn't-a-lossy-format-make-more-sense? dept.

@10u8 writes "The Vatican Library plans to digtize 80,000 manuscripts and store them in the open data format FITS, originally developed for astronomy and maintained under the IAU. The result is expected to be 40 million pages and 45 petabytes. FITS was chosen because it 'has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.'"

15 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. inb4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    inb4 relgious hatred and hatred of the religious.

    1. Re:inb4 by carlmenezes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Really? Heard of priest-scientists? ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/nyregion/13jaki.html?_r=2&hpw , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23640170/, http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/priest-turned-scientist-francisco-ayala-wins-153-million-prize/19414671)

      --
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  2. 40 Years? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Wikipedia page states FITS was created in '81. How does that translate to more than 40 years of use?

  3. Poem of the Man God by smoothnorman · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'll believe it when they digitize and make available the works of Maria Valtorta (not so long ago forbidden by cardinal Ratzinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poem_of_the_Man_God#Publication_controversy

  4. DjVu? by photonic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It might not be around as long as FITS, but isn't DjVu more suited for the digitization of manuscripts? If I understand it correctly, DjVu was designed for this job, while FITS was designed for astronomical data, not exactly the same. Not that I am an expert ...

    --
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    1. Re:DjVu? by TerranFury · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They did that a while ago; they have an observatory and host astronomy conferences. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.

    2. Re:DjVu? by Lifix · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It might not be around as long as FITS, but isn't DjVu more suited for the digitization of manuscripts?

      The Vatican isn't choosing FITS because it's more suited towards digitization of manuscripts. The church intends to be around literally forever and they're choosing FITS because it too, should be around as long as there is SCIENCE! From the FITS wikipedia article: 'FITS was designed with an eye towards long-term archival storage, and the maxim once FITS, always FITS represents the requirement that developments to the format must not render invalid existing files using older versions.'

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    3. Re:DjVu? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      DjVu is littered with HOW many patents? Could you impelment a djvu decoder?

      Besides, I get the distinct impression they're going lossless with this (the argument being they don't want to repeat the work EVER again. Who knows, chances are in the future, this will probably be just 45x1PB drives in a SAN or something..)

  5. Re:Petabytes by iamhassi · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You read "petabytes", and think "pedophile"? Seems someone has a problem...

    And why does Chrome think petabytes is a misspelling and want me to change it to gigabytes? Hello Google! You probably deal with more petabytes than anyone, how does your browser not recognize that word?

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  6. Re:The Pope Has Spoken, It Is Done! by gman003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a Catholic myself, I can assure you that the Church bureaucracy makes every other organization seem small. It's not even the left and right hands working in opposite directions, it's the three left hands disagreeing with the two right hands and the foot. The head has very little idea what's going on, and several sections outright ignore it, or at least filter out whatever they disagree with.

  7. Image size? by by+(1706743) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (45 petabytes) / (40 million pages) ~= 1.2 gigabytes / page. Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?

    1. Re:Image size? by ALecs · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes :) FITS files are HUGE!

      As a sysadmin for an astronomy observatory I find this laughable. FITS was designed to store every last detail about an image (and frequencies for radio astronomy) and it seems WAY overkill to burn that many bits digitizing manuscripts.

      But hey, who am I to question the word of the church? :)

  8. New metric unit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    So, is the Vatican Library the new metric equivalent of a Library of Congress?

    Wiki say a LOC is approximately 20 tebibytes of uncompressed data, while VL is apparently 45 petabytes.

    So, that means (if I did the math right) that it takes about 2046 LOC to equal just one VL. Crazy!

  9. Re:What about the Monks? by bdam · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If we're lucky, they'll use that extra time to brew beer.

  10. Re:Petabytes by Dragonslicer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Leviticus specifically states that gays, or at least gay men, "must be put to death".

    Obligatory question: Why can't I own a Canadian?.

    Anyone that believes that homosexuality is wrong because their religious text says so, and then takes their family out for a nice ham dinner after Church on Sunday, is a full-fledged hypocrite.