It is important to attempt an assessment of the reliability of the
determined temperatures and, in an initial test, we relate them to
several photometric parameters that are sensitive to temperature.
An advantage of this method is that it subsequently also makes available
a large body of new stellar temperatures, of good accuracy, through the use
of a database of the appropriate stellar parameters. The parameters used
are 
, 
and 
,
taken from the literature and
corrected for interstellar extinction as already described. A further
potentially important quantity is 
,
especially because, as pointed
out by Carney et al. (1994),
this parameter is not greatly sensitive to
metallicity. However, it is less useful because the present infrared data
are based partly on three distinct systems for K, which can only be
interchanged with difficulty, so tests must be confined to each of the
three systems separately. Because it is likely that such temperature/colour
relations depend slightly on stellar luminosity, we discuss in Sect. 5
the results for the two broad luminosity classes III and V separately,
beginning with the published narrow band measures and the narrow band
measures contained in the present new data base of infrared measures.