NDF Extensions

An important feature of the NDF  is that it is designed to be extensible. The NDF has components whose meanings are well defined and universal, and so they can be accessed by general-purpose software, such as KAPPA and CONVERT provide; but the NDF also allows independent extensions to be defined and added, which can store auxiliary information to suit the needs of a specialised software package. (Note that the term extension here refers to a structure within the NDF for storing additional data, and is neither the file extension .sdf nor extensions like BINTABLE within the FITS file.) An extension is only processed by software that understands the meanings obeys the processing rules of the various components of the extension. Other programmes propagate the extension information unaltered.

The existence of extensions makes it straightforward to write general utilities for converting an arbitrary format into an NDF. The idea being that every specialist package should not have to have its own conversion tools such as a FITS reader. However, this still leaves the additional data that requires specialist knowledge to move it into the appropriate extension components. The aim is to make the conversions themselves extensible, with add-on operations to move the specialist information to and from the extensions. This is where the FITS `airlock' comes in.

The FITS data format comprises a header followed by the data array or table. The header contains a series of 80-character lines each of which contains the keyword name, a value and an optional comment. There are also some special keywords for commentary. The meanings of most keywords are undefined, and so can be used to transport arbitrary ancillary information, subject to FITS syntax limitations. There is a special NDF extension called FITS, which mirrors this functionality, and may be added to an NDF. It therefore can act as an airlock between the general-purpose conversion tools and specialist packages.