When reading through your forum and public mailing list, I found that someone asked whether there are any other folks out there doing similar work. Right now, this posting is to tell you of their existence.
The Observation Manager project on SF (URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/observation/ ) just has similar goals than xmlAstro. We recently released a first draft of our XML Schema, an example doc with sample observations and some XSLTs not considered to be part of the "standard" but for illustrative purposes.
The Observation Manager team mainly consists of German amateur astronomers, some of them are professional software developers as well. The German "Vereinigung der Sternfreunde" is the largest astronomy association in Germany and has some 4000+ members. One year ago they founded a new division for computer applications in amateur astronomy. Call it COMAST (for "computers in astronomy"). The homepage is (no surprise) in German and can be found on www.hobby-astronomie.net/coma
Soon I joined the group and made the proposal to start work for an XML based standard for the documentation and exchange of astronomical "logbooks". This was motivated by my developments of a "deep sky observation planning" software called "Eye&Telescope". E&T is in German language up to now, but some day it will hit the international market. E&T provides logging capabilities and it's open view of things suggests to create HTML pages for logbook records quite naturally. So I started working on XML export and transformations with Xalan. When googling, if found Peter Chapins home page and the related contents. This was my insight that I'm not alone ;-)
So things came together and another guy (Dirk Lehmann) who had some plans for a "observation editor and browser" and the leader of our COMAST group (Heiko Garrelts) now joined efforts and decided to contact your project. We choose English as the language for our SF project in order to allow for international participants like you!
One of our further goals is to establish an Internet application capable of accepting and issuing XML observation logs. We have contacts to some programmers of planetarium type software and want to establish a standard for data exchange (not only observations; pure catalog data in schema compliant form as well). It also seems very promising to promote some interfaces by which applications could make better use of such standards. First contact to ASCOM was made. But right now they are more on the technical level and some dispute about the role of being a "standards body" caused a lot of traffic in the newsgroup.
Now we would be very pleased to hear from you and to find out whether we have thought to share or things to do in common. Just make up your kind about this possible cooperation and send as a statement in our "Open Discussion" forum.
My personal email adress is th.pfleger@t-online.de.
Kind regards and clear skies,
Thomas Pfleger
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Dear XMLAstro team members!
When reading through your forum and public mailing list, I found that someone asked whether there are any other folks out there doing similar work. Right now, this posting is to tell you of their existence.
The Observation Manager project on SF (URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/observation/ ) just has similar goals than xmlAstro. We recently released a first draft of our XML Schema, an example doc with sample observations and some XSLTs not considered to be part of the "standard" but for illustrative purposes.
The Observation Manager team mainly consists of German amateur astronomers, some of them are professional software developers as well. The German "Vereinigung der Sternfreunde" is the largest astronomy association in Germany and has some 4000+ members. One year ago they founded a new division for computer applications in amateur astronomy. Call it COMAST (for "computers in astronomy"). The homepage is (no surprise) in German and can be found on www.hobby-astronomie.net/coma
Soon I joined the group and made the proposal to start work for an XML based standard for the documentation and exchange of astronomical "logbooks". This was motivated by my developments of a "deep sky observation planning" software called "Eye&Telescope". E&T is in German language up to now, but some day it will hit the international market. E&T provides logging capabilities and it's open view of things suggests to create HTML pages for logbook records quite naturally. So I started working on XML export and transformations with Xalan. When googling, if found Peter Chapins home page and the related contents. This was my insight that I'm not alone ;-)
So things came together and another guy (Dirk Lehmann) who had some plans for a "observation editor and browser" and the leader of our COMAST group (Heiko Garrelts) now joined efforts and decided to contact your project. We choose English as the language for our SF project in order to allow for international participants like you!
One of our further goals is to establish an Internet application capable of accepting and issuing XML observation logs. We have contacts to some programmers of planetarium type software and want to establish a standard for data exchange (not only observations; pure catalog data in schema compliant form as well). It also seems very promising to promote some interfaces by which applications could make better use of such standards. First contact to ASCOM was made. But right now they are more on the technical level and some dispute about the role of being a "standards body" caused a lot of traffic in the newsgroup.
Now we would be very pleased to hear from you and to find out whether we have thought to share or things to do in common. Just make up your kind about this possible cooperation and send as a statement in our "Open Discussion" forum.
My personal email adress is th.pfleger@t-online.de.
Kind regards and clear skies,
Thomas Pfleger