Hyperatlas is an open standard intended to facilitate the large-scale federation of image-based data. The subject of hyperatlas is the space of sphere-to-plane projection mappings (the FITS-WCS information), and the standard consists of coherent collections of these on which data can be resampled and thereby federated with other image data. We hope for a distributed effort that will produce a multi-faceted image atlas of the sky, made by federating many different surveys at different wavelengths and different times. We expect that hyperatlas-compliant imagery will be published and discovered through an International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) registry, and that grid-based services will emerge for the required resampling and mosaicking.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0312195,
title = {Hyperatlas: A New Framework for Image Federation},
author = {R. D. Williams and S. G. Djorgovski and M. T. Feldmann and J. C. Jacob},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0312195},
year = {2007}
}