Marine Data Format Types:
There is no formal typology of scientific data format types, but clearly there are broad groupings based on similarity. Within the marine sciences, the editors of OceanTeacher 1.0 originally catalogued over 300 known formats used in recent and contemporary data sources. This number has fortunately dropped during the past decade, as some formats disappeared and a few became widely used as "de facto" standards. It has been useful from the beginning to group them by type, because similar (or identical) methods can be used to manage all datasets within any type.
The current data formats typology is re-arranged from that
used in OceanTeacher 1.0, for images and mapping. For completeness we recognize
now the Compression type; and the former Stratified type has been re-named the
Archive type. If you browse through these subsections, you can see examples of
most ASCII formats displayed directly.
The OceanTeacher training program is principally concerned with the advance of marine data management skills among a global community of scientists who rely mainly on the Windows operating system on a personal computer. Our bias toward these resources is quite obvious, particularly in the materials presented here. If you are fortunate enough to have more advanced resources, then we also usually find that the materials presented here do not target you. Where truly good training or explanatory materials exist, we aim to include UNIX/LINUX applications that can be installed in "X-augmented" Windows systems, but only when no comparable native Windows application exists. Also, in many articles you will find that the views expressed are completely based on the Windows/PC paradigm, without any reference to UNIX/LINUX options or other higher-level systems. We apologize beforehand for this myopia, but by means of this paragraph we've tried to warn you.