(meteorobs) Databases and formats, was: Appeal to meteorobs observers

[Rainer Arlt]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 06:07:40PM -0700, Chris Peterson wrote:
> Well, the format I collect the data in is somewhat different, and not 
> easily translated (nor do I wish to adopt the format used by the video 
> section). In general, it would be nice if there was a way to better 
> integrate video and visual observations in a common database. I may do 
> some work along those lines this year.

Contributions in this direction are most welcome! Let me give a short
status of what is currently being done:

First, there is the question of standardized video reporting. There is
the way MetRec by Sirko Molau works, and it produces standard reports, and 
the database from these results is already huge! But video observations
need a certain standard hardware. We don't have the problem that much in
visual observing, because the standard hardware is already defined:
the human eyes. At the moment, activity comparisons among different
video systems are a bit tricky but possible. Perhaps Sirko will com-
ent on that. If one operates a Matrox Meteor Framegrabber as required
by Sirko's software, all the results will be available to the video
database immediately. So there is a standard way, but it may not be
accessible to everybody right now.

As to unifying the visual and video databases, there is the project
led by Geert Garentsen at http://umdb.urania.be which has exactly that 
aim.

Geert visited Sirko in the end of 2007 to talk about the requirements
from the video side. I will visit Geert next week to work on the
visual part. The Visual Meteor Database will migrate into that UMDB
in the course of 2008.

There are certainly a lot of applications and tools that have to 
be written for such a system, that we would be happy if somebody
will take part in the project.

Best regards,
Rainer


--
Rainer Arlt -- www.aip.de/People/rarlt --  +49-331-7499-354 -- fax: -526