Hi all,
One of the many fruitful topics of discussion at EclipseCon was data structures for the SWG, and I'd like to summarize the progress to date and solicit some input from the group.
First a brief history:
Back in August in Trondheim, the SWG was in general agreement having a set of standardised data structures would be the way forward for good tool interoperability. Matt Gerring ran through pros & cons of different options and proposed we adopt Diamond's IDataset.
Following on from that, Jonah Graham forked IDataset to make it more accesible to SWG members.
Peter Chang then further cleaned up and restructured the classes getting them into a very good state to be used by the community.
The logical next step was to make this available as a standalone project as part of the Science Working Group. So this was brought up at the unconference this week. What I learnt is that a project can have 2 project co-leads. JayJay Billings recommended this (as is being done in Triquetrium) and it has a lot of merit. That way if we have Jonah Graham & Peter Chang as co-project leads we have a good split of responsibilities.
SWG members at the unconference were very enthusiastic and many offers of potential contributions as well.
Also, that old issue of naming cropped up, e.g. Tobias raised some good points about how the naming is very generic, Idatasets represent ndarrays but perhaps we should consider other data structures too (e.g. what about dataframes...)
In conclusion, we would like to go ahead and make this happen. Jay Billings has offered to get the ball rolling in terms of giving Eclipse Foundation the heads up. What we need now is your feedback, but mostly the list of 'interested parties' to strengthen the project proposal.
Regards,
Tracy
