General discussion about H5MD (usage and prospective features). H5MD is a file format specification, based upon HDF5, aimed at the efficient and portable storage of molecular data (e.g. simulation trajectories, molecular structures, ...).

Pierre de Buyl | 30 Aug 2011 16:43

h5md group

Hello,

For now, the h5md group contains only attributes. This was meant to  
indicate the "metadata" nature of the fields found in there.

However, as it contains only these, we may consider moving them as  
datasets. It makes the rapid exploration of the files with h5ls easier.

This is just a question, not a push from my side.

Pierre

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Peter Colberg | 30 Aug 2011 17:15

Re: h5md group

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 04:43:19PM +0200, Pierre de Buyl wrote:
> For now, the h5md group contains only attributes. This was meant to
> indicate the "metadata" nature of the fields found in there.
> 
> However, as it contains only these, we may consider moving them as
> datasets. It makes the rapid exploration of the files with h5ls
> easier.
> 
> This is just a question, not a push from my side.

Let's keep the attributes. That is their purpose, to store metadata.

I would consider h5ls broken then .

To inspect HDF5 files, I use “h5dump -A …file…”. Note how, besides the
structure, this also prints the attribute data, but skips dataset data.
From this tool's point of view, that makes attributes preferable to
datasets for metadata.

Peter