Vatican chooses Open Source

Vatican Apostolic Library Information Technology Director (Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana) Luciano Ammenti (Luciano Ammenti) told the audience at EMC World that he was committed to free software. Senor Ammenti is now leading the process of digitizing a large number of ancient library manuscripts and is seriously concerned about the preservation and availability of this knowledge after 50 years.

The Vatican library stores about 82,000 documents. To convert them to digital form with subsequent posting on the Internet, the employees of the Holy See intended to use the TIFF format, but they were stopped by the fact that the format was not only closed, and was last updated in 1998. In addition, the TIFF format is 32-bit and not ready for creating stereo images. As Senmentor Ammenti mentioned, using Microsoft Word or Power Point formats is generally a bad idea, because no one can be sure if people can read them in half a century.

As a result, the experts opted for the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) graphic format, which, unlike TIFF, has all the required advantages: it is open, regularly updated, 64-bit and suitable for creating 3D images (3D means the color plane ). FITS was created by NASA in 1979 for storing and sharing files that are obtained in astronomical observatories using digital telescopes. In 2008, FITS 3.0 was adopted as a standard by the International Astronomical Union.
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About a year ago, Pope Francis 1 called the Internet "God's gift", but he still warned young people against possible isolation because of communication only within the Network. Despite this, Francis 1 believes that the Internet "... provides a great opportunity to meet people belonging to different cultures and find a common language with them."