An important component of scientific work is being able to take your data with you as you move from one position to another, and being able to work with the data files on the computer systems at your new institute. Similarly, it's vital to be able to exchange data files with colleagues or just read your own files in multiple different packages.
Therefor it is important to have standards-based data formats, that are openly and well documented, so that anyone can implement a reader or writer for the format. Please use this page to list:
- the data formats you use
- the debian packages needed for working with the format
- other packages used with that format
hdf5
[http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/["HDF5"]/ Hierarchical Data format] is an extremely flexible format, possibly too flexible for its own good
[http://packages.debian.org/stable/science/hdf5-tools hdf5-tools] (and many other related packages)
FITS
[http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Flexible Image Transport System] was developed for astronomy, but could be used by many disciplines. One notable feature is good support for World Coordinates, i.e. translation between pixel coordinates and physical coordinates such as Longitude & Latitude, Frequency, Stokes parameters (polarisation).
[http://packages.debian.org/stable/devel/libcfitsio2 libcfitsio2] (plus perl wrappers)
[http://packages.debian.org/stable/math/pdl pdl] display & analysis
[http://packages.debian.org/stable/science/saods9 saods9] image viewer
XML variants
[wiki:?["VOTable"] http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/VOT.html] Virtual Observatory Table format
Links
[http://www.microformats.org/ microformats] may be a useful avenue to explore A [http://www.openraw.org/ raw] digital camera format is essential for scientific imaging work