This is a whiteboard for discussing design of collection/dataset (de-)serialization.

Desired Use Cases

• Supports real-valued dense or sparse matrices with optional row and column labels

This is similar to an R data.frame or matrix. This is a separate use case because it will often require special formats to achieve high performance.

• Supports dense or sparse matrices containing numbers and strings with optional row and column labels

This is similar to an R data.frame that contains non-numeric data.

• Supports semi-structured lists of instances which contain named fields whose values are either numbers, strings or semi-structured data structures.

This could be supported by, for instance, the IBM implementation of JSON used by Jaql.

ARFF format

• Old description of ARFF format: Attribute-Relation File Format (ARFF)
• Supercedes above-linked documentation: ARFF (3.5.1)
• Discussion of ARFF format on Wekalist, including the full text of an ANTLR grammar to parse it: ARFF format syntax (thread)