Data Standards

A modern, human-readable data format developed by the astronomy community as a successor to FITS for complex data — used by the James Webb Space Telescope for its calibration and world-coordinate metadata and adopted as the primary data format of the Roman mission.

The universal file format of astronomy — a self-describing container for images, tables, and spectra with a human-readable header of metadata. In use since the 1980s and still the standard way astronomical data is stored and shared.

The Virtual Observatory's XML standard for exchanging tabular data — catalogues and query results — between archives, tools, and services, so tables flow between systems without custom parsing.