Revised HDF5 DTD (Version 1 -QAK)

3/7/00
QAK

Summary

I revised Bob's HDF-5 DTD following the discussions two weeks ago. This version of the DTD corresponds more to the upcoming 1.4 release than the current 1.2 release, but the differences are very minor between the two DTD versions.

The changes are:

  1. Changed "BootBlock" to "SuperBlock"
  2. Re-arranged Stored Datatypes vs. Datatypes in groups, etc.
  3. Changed Name to Required, from Implied
  4. Moved Simple Dataspace from in the middle of the datatype definitions to where the other dataspaces are defined.
  5. Added ArrayType and VLType to Datatype definition
  6. Changed CompoundType to allow fields of any datatype and removed "arrayness" from fields.
  7. Removed OBJ-XID & Parents from Datatype & moved them to StoredDatatype
  8. Added Mantissa, Sign & Exponent to FloatType
  9. General Re-arrangement to bring similar things closer in document.
The revised DTD is here:
HDF5-DTD-1-QAK.dtd


Important Questions For Discussion


I did not attempt to tackle the problem of encoding the data itself.


The groups (& root group) are not correct yet - either they contain links or they "contain" the datasets, datatypes & other groups, but not both.