JData specifications: a general-purpose data storage and interchange interchange format

Status of This Document

This document is current under the state of "Request for Comments". It does not specify a standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) Qianqian Fang (2015).

Version

RFC.pre.0

Last Update

Jan. 02, 2015

Abstract

JData is a general-purpose data interchange format. It was derived from the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) [RFC 4627] and Universal Binary JSON specifications. JData defines a list of dedicated "name" fields to represent a wide range of data structures, including scalars, arrays, tables, structures, hashes, trees and graphs.

1. Introduction

Data are the digital representations of our world. Generating and processing data are the essential parts of our daily lives, and are at the very foundations of modern sciences, information technologies, businesses, and the functions of our global societies.

Data take many different forms. Some data can be represented by simple scalars; some others have complex forms with hierarchical structures. An efficient representation of data also strongly depends on the application needs. In some cases, plain text files with white-space or comma-separated numbers are sufficient; however, for performance-sensitive applications, compact, binary, and byte-aligned data formats are critical to the reduction of the loading and processing time.

It is a challenging task to encapsulate a wide varieties of data forms into a single data interchange format. There has been many previous efforts in developing a general-purpose data format.

1.1. Conventions Used in This Document

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 2119].

The grammatical rules in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 4234].

2. JSON Grammar

JSON grammar used in JData is defined in [RFC 4627].

3. JData Keywords

3.1 Data Array Storage Keywords

In this document, we consider the following general data storage models:

• a full array (empty, 1D, 2D, 3D or in higher dimensions)
• a sparse array (empty, 1D, 2D, 3D or in higher dimensions)

 _ArraySize_, _ArrayType_, _ArrayData_,
 _ArrayIsComplex_, _ArrayIsSparse_

3.1 Data Representing Keywords

All JData keywords are case sensitive.

In this document, we define the meanings for the following JData keywords that represents mesh-related data structures:

3.1 Meta-data Keywords

In this document, we defines the following JMesh keywords to represent non-geometric meta-data:

 Author, CreationTime, Comment