Hi, some of the people in my lab are interested in collaboratively compiling a large quantity of environmental data- each user appending several hundred measurements of several variables every week.
They are currently emailing around a spread sheet file and there have been numerous data accidents. Now they are asking to put the file onto a shared drive, so that they can access it remotely. This sounds like a terrible idea to me- even worse than the previous attempt. The data are essentially rows and cols of numbers that are added to and edited weekly. At first I thought subversion might be helpful, but revision control doesn't work so well with binary data (excel files)... unless there is something I don't know about. It would be hard to detect conflicts, or to merge data. However, it would allow for timestamps and revision numbers to provide some level of authority. Designing some kind of database-driven system seems like a logical choice, but I do not have the time to do this. Perhaps there is already something out there. Does anyone have some insight into how to solve this data management nighmare? Cheers, Dylan -- Dylan Beaudette Soil Resource Laboratory http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/ University of California at Davis 530.754.7341 _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
