Astrophysics

Metadata Standards

FITS - Flexible Image Transport System: Used by the astronomy community to originally describe telescope images, but is now a family of standards to describe multi-dimensional data including spatial, spectral and temporal dimensions and the scaling and distortions that may be present.
SDAC - Standard for Documentation of Astronomical Catalogues: Used as an alternative to FITS for archiving astronomical data in a form that is more accessible to humans and standard Unix command-line tools.

FITS World Coordinate System (WCS): An extension of FITS that enables data to be defined to specify physical, or world coordinates within each pixel in an image. The conventions were orignally proposed in 2002 then incorporated into the 3.0 release of the FITS standard.

FITS Image Software Packages: Software packages that display or manipulate the relatively simple class of FITS data files that containing 2-dimensional images
SDAC Tools: A set of four tools for working with SDAC-compliant archives: acut can be used to edit text files in a columnar fashion; trcol removes or transforms columns from a text file; anafile verifies that data files conform to their description; tofits converts SDAC tables to FITS tables.

CDS - Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg: CDS (Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg/Strasbourg astronomical Data Centre) is a member of the ICSU World Data System, specialising in astronomical data and related information. Its VizieR catalogue system uses SDAC to organise data and metadata holdings.
ESA - European Space Agency: ESA is an international organisation with 20 Member States that coordinates the financial and intellectual resources of it's members to facilitate space related programmes and activities. Image data is released using FITS for many missions.
HEASARC: The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) is the primary archive for NASA's (and other space agencies') missions dealing with electromagnetic radiation from extremely energetic phenomena ranging from black holes to the Big Bang.
IVOA - International Virtual Observatory Alliance: The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) is an organisation that debates and agrees to technical standards that are needed to make the Virtual Observatory possible. FITS is one of those standards.
JAXA - Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency: Japan's independent administrative institution that handles research and development in space and aviation areas.
STEREO Science Center: Archive for STEREO telemetry, mission support data, and higher level instrument data and analysis software.
Virtual Solar Observatory