| [stem-dev] Changes to the earthscience data format |
Hi everyone,
I am working on adding ten years of earthscience data into STEM (the org.eclipse.stem.internal.data.geography.earthscience plugin).
I'd like to propose a few changes to the data format as follows:
1) Rounding: The current data files contain very precise numbers with many digits in the fractional part. I suggest to round most numbers to two fractional digits, which should be sufficient for temperature (celcius), rainfall (millimeters), and elevation (meters). For vegetation, I suggest we use three fractional digits because the values range from -0.1 to 0.9.
2) Data Fields: The current data files contain eight fields for each point in time:
# Field 1: Average
# Field 2: Standard Deviation
# Field 3: Maximum
# Field 4: Minimum
# Field 5: Range
# Field 6: Skewness
# Field 7: Kurtosis
# Field 8: Root Mean Square
I propose to remove skewness and kurtosis (fields 6 and 7). They are measurements for statistical distributions and cannot really be applied to these data sets.
3) Lastly, I was wondering if there are any other derived values that should be added to the list above.
Thanks,
Jan :-)
Jan H. Pieper
IBM Almaden Research Center
mail: jhpieper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx