Background

There are two main astronomical data formats, the FITS and the VOTable formats. The FITS (Flexible image transport system) format is widely used in astronomy and has been extended to handle non-image data. For transporting large amounts of tabular data, the FITS binary table is the preferred format. Some of the problems with this format are that it is only used in astronomy so there is limited generic software and the FITS format is difficult to stream as the number of rows has to be specified.
The VOTable format is an XML based format and has been designed to allow easy translation from FITS. The main problem with this format is the verbosity of XML. There are a significant number of legacy FITS data files which would be useful to convert into the VOTable format. It would also be useful to be able to convert VOTables into FITS binary tables to help data transportation of large datasets in the Virtual Obervatory.

BinX Applications

Several applications have been developed using the BinX library to help with astronomical data access and file conversion. An application has been developed to convert from the old FITS binary tables to the new VOTables and back from VOTables to FITS binary tables. This application will help with data transportation, the VOTables (XML data) are translated into binary data (FITS) before transfer and then back to VOTables (XML data) at the destination site. This application can also extract the metadata from the headers of non-bintable extensions (e.g. images) in FITS files.

This project is now complete.