I plan to produce some time series data and i would like it to be in a form that makes it easy or effortless for pre-existing programs to plot or even process further.
The data would consist of a few hundred to a few thousand time points, and for each time point there would be a half-dozen to a dozen values. So conceptually it would be something like a csv file with a few hundred to a few thousand rows, and a half-dozen to a dozen columns. However, a csv file doesn't seem exactly right, as i would like the files to include some embedded metadata (ideally in some form that at least in principle could be digested by another program). I suppose i could have some comment lines somehow, but that feels pretty ad hoc. But maybe i'm being overly fastidious. Something like a RIFF file format (like WAVE) might be better, but not sure what it would be. For the plotting or processing software i'd want to use something like octave or python/matplotlib or a derivative. I googled around for time series file formats, and i didn't see exactly what i was looking for. So i'd appreciate any advice or suggestions, and thanks in advance! dan
