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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.'"
[insert tasteless joke here]
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
The Wikipedia page states FITS was created in '81. How does that translate to more than 40 years of use?
Not really. Nowhere in TFA does it mention these records being available to the general public, let alone free to download over the net. Just because they are digitizing the archives for some safety/redundancy does NOT mean that the church is suddenly backtracking and opening the archives up to everyone.
Right. And by that, you mean that Slashdot said this other site said the Pope said. Did you ever consider looking at what he actually said, or are you just making another Regensburg lecture out of it? :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Sadly, that PBS story didn't include any links to the original text. So we don't know what the Pope actually said, only what Margaret Warner claimed he said, based on an on the fly translation.
BTW, why do you expect the Torah and the New Testament to be any more consistent than US law (about, say, races) in 1800 vs. 2000?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
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 ...
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Not really. Nowhere in TFA does it mention these records being available to the general public, let alone free to download over the net. Just because they are digitizing the archives for some safety/redundancy does NOT mean that the church is suddenly backtracking and opening the archives up to everyone.
We must have read different articles, the second link to the British Library is confusing if what you say is true:
I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.
While not free it sounds like they want to make them more available and make a little cash on the side too to me. Nevertheless they will use the internet to not only spread these articles but also make money. Still a bit two faced, wouldn't you say? Although it's not the utmost in transparency it's still more so than locked underneath the Vatican where only the most holy scholars on site can read them.
My work here is dung.
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.
I am naturally very excited about the news. This is a very ambitious project on one of the world's most important manuscript collections. I will keep my eyes peeled for any further details and developments. I am particularly interested in the business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible. In particular, I am thinking of the manuscripts that are held across institutions and the potential for aggregating them (or even 'virtually re-uniting' them) in Virtual Research Environments.
The way I read the article that paragraph is just the blogger's opinion. He says he will "keep his eyes peeled for any further details," and that he's interested in the "business model that the Vatican Library will adopt in making these manuscripts digitally accessible." Nowhere does he say that this will ACTUALLY happen, though.
Does this mean in the monasteries we are going to have monks transcribing these manuscripts bit by bit? I mean, if you just scan the stuff in what else will they have to do all day. Pray for the boredom to be over...
(45 petabytes) / (40 million pages) ~= 1.2 gigabytes / page. Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
(45 petabytes) / (40 million pages) ~= 1.2 gigabytes / page. Is it just me, or does that seem a little big?
Storage is cheap. The manual process of scanning each of these documents is the costly part. It is thus better to scan at the maximum resolution and quality possible so that they never have to do it again. They may even be scanning multiple passes with different methods (visible, IR, etc.). 1.2GB per page is not unreasonable, even if it uses a lossless compression scheme.
You can find child abuse -everywhere- that you have people in charge of children. There have been child abuse in public schools, yet that hardly justifies condemning education.
There are a -lot- of things you can condemn the Catholic church about, namely the power abuse historically, the sale of indulgences and the failure to adapt to the 21st century. The entire format of the Catholic church is born out of an illiterate population filled with 'visions'. But the entire church failed to change for an enlightened, reasoned population.
But honestly, using child abuse to justify your argument against the Catholic church is simply sensationalized. Had it been anything other than a church it would already be forgotten.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology? Obviously, you can't expect any religious group to completely dismiss any role for God to play (if they did they wouldn't be a religion), but they've gone on record saying that Evolution is correct.
It's the folks that read a few Bible verses and then take them as the 100% literal History Of The World that really oppose all things science (as opposed to being a book that man needs to interpret).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wow... how do you feel about US public schools then? I've read that there are much higher rates of abuse there - just less publicity.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Had it been anything other than a church it would have been dealt with much more severely by outside powers.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
From the Wikipedia page on the Vatican Library:
The Vatican Library is a research library for history, law, philosophy, science and theology, open to anyone who can document their qualifications and their research needs to view the collection. Photocopies for private study of pages from books published between 1801 and 1990 can be requested in person or by mail.
It's site is here.
It's not uncommon for a research library to be closed for the general public and only open for specialists due to the fragility of a manuscript collection.
The BAV has not made any announcement if the digital archives are going to be open or not, so it's all speculation.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
It's protestants that believe in creationism
I doubt they're hiding much in the library... thousands of academics are there every year. No, having Joe Public in the stacks is not conducive with preservation - you are welcome to obtain copies.
You can't check out the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives, either!
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
But everyone looks the other way from what the dick is doing.
The Unix file system UFS, AKA FFS and Berkley FFS has been around since the late 70s.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
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)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology?.
Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun. Yes, Galileo was an ass about how he said it, but it doesn't change the fact that the church opposed the science with real physical and political force. Since this is how a "more reasonable major religion" behaves I think this is an EXCELLENT argument against "moderate" religion.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Not really, but I find very funny that the Vatican is using “science and technology" to store its manuscripts, when at the same time they spit so much on this same science and technology.
The currently accepted theory regarding the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was developed by a catholic priest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
The vatican operates a world class astronomical observatory.
http://vaticanobservatory.org/VOF/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1
When I was an undergraduate at a california state university the dean of the chemistry department was also the parish priest at a small local church.
Some religious individuals view math and science as a tool to understand god's creation. Isaac Newton comes to mind.
--
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"Does it matter?" I don't know, man, that depends on what sort of a moral world-view you're subscribing to, and what you mean by "matter". Personally, I don't have a world-view where it's all fine and dandy for me to twist peoples' words and laugh at them for being hypocrites in one matter just because they've done something wrong in another matter, in any case at all. I consider this, first, as a responsibility towards myself. Slashdot-types, who might be thought to ostensibly value Science, ought to be those best able to appreciate some notion of "intellectual honesty". If you then move to the world in general, I don't think that spreading lies or half-truths and such is ever called for, if you think that the Catholic Church is such a villain that you should be able to tell whatever [lies|half-truths|exxagerations] that you can get away with that day (in order to spread to the world a better sense of its villainy, even if it doesn't rest on a foundation of truth) then that's another matter, but I don't think there's any real room for doing so and not being aware that you're rationally doing so and instead relying on blind instinctual hate for the organization.
So yeah, I'd say it does matter -- even if the Catholic Church is Hitler + Lenin + the child abuser of the week + the devil + [Al Gore|George W Bush] and worthy of nothing but hate, I don't see any way that ignorance improves the matter. In fact, it would be downright hypocritical to say that it does, in the light of talking about comments on openness, communication and transparency.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The Institute of Physics's magazine /Physics World/ did an article on his trial last year (IIRC, it may have been earlier). He was tried for heresy, but the reason he was tried was not for heliocentric theory, but rather for insulting the Pope (who had been interested in his theories) about an unrelated (somewhat political) matter instead of answering his questions. IOW, he was killed not for arguing against the church but for publicly insulting the man with the power to have him killed, which is generally regarded as a bad idea.
Every religion ever created by man has splintered, and will continue to do so.
There is no reality for them to agree on.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Its actually quite funny, the website actually has the title "secret archives", and offers to sell you scanned copies on CD.