Files

Files

Of course, final results are saved in files. But it is also necessary or desirable to keep intermediate results. With the log files, intermediate files guaranty the traceability of the results. The documentation process is documented! Intermediate files can be used for themselves (look at the points measured one day for instance) but also to re-assess the methodology and give the possibly to restart the model construction process from a specific step. This methodology requires that changes in a file are saved to another file.

Note on the type of le used

All files produced by software tools of this project are plain text files (with the exception of image files). In this way, the risk to loose access to the data is minimised.This is particularly important in the framework of Cultural Heritage Conservation where you are working with a long timeframe in mind.

Format is documented and kept as simple as possible. This is an example of a point file:

5
0 0 0
1 0 0
0 1 0
1 1 0

See also [File formats]

It is of course possible to compress files with standard programs (arguably less likely to disappear) but in general we prefer not to do so. The following example shows how it is possible to translate points saved in a compressed file and to copy the result to another compressed file.

computer% gunzip -c test.pt.gz | translate 1 0 0 | gzip > test2.pt.gz

Some XML formats are also in development.