On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Rufus Pollock <[email protected]>wrote:
> Today I wrote a post on distributed revision/version control for data: > > > http://blog.okfn.org/2010/07/12/we-need-distributed-revisionversion-control-for-data/ > > I'd be very interested to hear any comments people have, or any useful > pointers to existing technology. > > Regards, > > Rufus > > I think this is really important, but I think you are right that it requires domain-specific tools (and indeed I think that any data repositories will require domain-specific management - diffs are important but not critical). I have used normal SCM to store some of my data. My problem is that often updates takes lots of time even in very little has changed. This is partly because the data can differ in insignifiacnt ways which still require formal diffs. For example if a program recalculates data the new output may differ in insignificant digits but these mandate that the whole data set is replaced with a new version. The main current version of SCM for data is that the data are actually stored at least once! (Many scientists store the data zero times). P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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