[ckan-discuss] Tabular data formats

[Tim McNamara]

On 10 October 2011 03:23, William Waites <ww at styx.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Oct 2011 15:02:05 +0100, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> said:
>
>    rufus> As you'll see the list is quite short and I'd love to hear
>    rufus> more / get links etc from people who know more than I (as
>    rufus> one example, I hear very positive things about R and its
>    rufus> data frames but have not yet tracked down a really good
>    rufus> overview of interface of how its designed).
>
> You might also mention NetCDF:
>
>    http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/
>
>    NetCDF is a set of software libraries and self-describing,
>    machine-independent data formats that support the creation,
>    access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data.
>
> It's a binary format and is heavily used for e.g. timeseries empirical
> measurements (found in the wild during the climate data debacle
> amongst others).


JSONH (https://github.com/WebReflection/JSONH) is an emergent standard
for sending data tabular in a highly compressible, but very easy to
parse manner. Currently, JavaScript and PHP implementations exist.

JSON:

[
  {"a":"A", "b":"B"},
  {"a":"C", "b":"D"},
  {"a":"E", "b":"F"}
]

JSONH:

[2,"a","b","A","B","C","D","E","F"]