James Coggins emphasised the importance of distributed services, on which he is doing research. He outlined how the services around the Gaming Table could interact. Of course systems will have to become more modular, with separate UI, data structures, standard services, etc. IRAF is already going in the direction sketched by Coggins. Eric Mandel .
Cooperation is necessary, but has political, social and economic implications.
Software systems can work together without sacrificing their independence. Let us start on a small scale. Allen Farris . We need a precisely defined, and commonly accepted, definition of basic measured entities. For instance, the definition of an Astronomical Image should formally specify public functions that supply specific information, not how the data is arranged.