Rhys, thanks for the comment and sorry for the delay. (Just got back from travel...)
> On the data side, using a skeletal HDF5/XML dump of a datafile to check that > it is valid according to some domain-specific schema will be handy. > I suggest adding recommended HDF5 attributes with particular names for such > validation purposes (e.g. an XML schema against which '/' or some other object should verify) > so that tools like h5diff could perform such a verification. This is an interesting idea. Although some users may perceive "recommended HDF5 attributes" as too prescriptive and as stepping on their toes. (Carrying that through the tool chain would be a big investment.) We were thinking of a more constraint-based approach, i.e., a domain expert would supply an XQuery (or XSL) transform that would convert an HDF5/XML representation into a Boolean valued checklist so that non-compliance can be easily assessed. The XQuery transform would consist more or less of a list of user-defined predicates (Boolean functions) which check, e.g., for the presence of certain groups or attributes, certain sizes etc. > It would be a huge win to toss a plugin into Firefox, point it at an HDF5 file, > provide a stylesheet, and find the datasets genuinely browsable. > I personally love the utility and quality of the un*x CLI toolset but I could > imagine browser capabilities easing HDF5 adoption by many folks. Good point. I hope HDFView will let you do that, but in the absence of that, most likely a browser will be at hand. > From where did you pull the fooT, barG, etc. naming convention? > I find the Hungarian-like notation a bit distracting compared to, > say, just spelling out "Type". No need to introduce brevity-- it's XML. No deep philosophical reason here and, no, brevity wasn't the goal. I just felt odd calling something 'datatypeType'. There's a certain terminological overload here, because we are dealing with HDF5 attributes and XML attributes, with HDF5 datatypes and XML schema datatypes, etc. Consistency and avoiding ambiguity, maybe at the expense of aesthetics, were the main goals. Thanks for those comments and let's keep up the discussion! Best, G. _______________________________________________ Hdf-forum is for HDF software users discussion. [email protected] http://mail.hdfgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/hdf-forum_hdfgroup.org
