Time Series File Naming Conventions
Draft Document

Rob MacLeod

• The Convention
• Editorial Comments
• About this document ...

With the growing number of time series files we are creating with the new graphicsio format, comes the need for a convention to name them. Similar conventions on the past have make .raw and .pak files manageable in the past and it seems we should develop the same system now. This is a draft suggestion for such a scheme.

The Convention

Wherever possible, we should name time series files as follows:

    IIDDDDDDD-NNN.tsdf

where

• II are the initials of the person who was responsible for the associated experiment or simulation, e.g., BT, RSM, RLL, BBP, etc.,.
• DDDDDD is the date in some human friendly format, e.g., 22nov98 or 1jan00 (do we really need Y2K compliance?). Some would argue that 991122 or 000101 would be better for sorting, but these formats are for computers, not people.
• NNN is the run number, just as we typically use it.
• As an option, for multiple files derived from the same run, we could append things like ``a'', ``b'', or ``c'', or perhaps something more user friendly like ``beat1'' or ``lastbeat''.

For managing these files, I have recently (like half an hour ago) written a program to list the contents of the headers for .tsdf files. For more information, surf over to tsdir

Editorial Comments

The main goal of this standard is to avoid huge filenames and also to come as close to sure that all filenames are globally unique. This means that a file can live in any directory, on any disk and still be uniquely identifiable. Depending on the subdirectory name seems dangerous to me, especially as we start to merge files from different experiments in the same place for the purpose of a larger study or meta analysis.

Now is the time to discuss this and I hope you all make suggestions. Please at least give it some thought and make suggestions. Especially if you decide you do not want to use it, let us know why.

About this document ...

Time Series File Naming Conventions
Draft Document

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 99.2beta6 (1.42)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 3 -no_white -link 3 -no_navigation -nomath -html_version 3.2,math filenaming

The translation was initiated by Rob MacLeod on 2000-11-26