Vatican Chooses Open FITS Image Format

@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.'"

Comments

Did they ask Pope?

[Ruvim]

This may go against His agenda

Naming conventions

[jollyreaper]

I hear they're going to call the results Portable Data Objects, PDO for short. All of the files will end in .PDO. The Vatican is going need a lot of resources to handle all of these PDO files.

Irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one revel in the irony of the Church trusting their sacred archives to science propagated by heathen astronomers, physicists, and double-damned astrophysicists.