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Re: approval procedure
Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
It might help if you included some info about where a particularly obscure
package was leading (e.g., I have no idea what HDF5 is or does, but I may
have heard of the other package you intend to produce that requires it).
HDF5 is a library for fast and efficient storage and recovery of
dimensional data. Unlike SQL RDBMs, it is mainly concerned with the
portable and efficient storage of large datasets, often of many
dimensions (space, time, temperature, etc). Although the kind of
queries that can be made are a subset of what one can do with an RDBMS,
it is much faster, typically keeping the data in the native
representation of the machine (suitably annotated). Then if the HDF5
file is given to someone else, the library automatically converts to the
right representation via the API. There are many features in the
library including non-trivial data structures like ragged arrays and
compound data types, support for different pluggable compression
techniques, ability to operate `over a wire' in cluster computing
environments, etc. but the basic idea is that is a portable way to have
fast, random access to big chunks of dimensional data. (Something you
don't have with a text file, say.)
It might help if you included some info about where a particularly obscure
package was leading
The other package I'm working on is a simulator for agent-based modeling (http://www.swarm.org). HDF5 is useful to this package because it provides a way to record the evolving state of a simulation and to load different sets of initial conditions (e.g. geographical maps).
Thanks for the tip about the package-server.