In this episode of "Call the Doctor," Aleksandar Jelenak discusses ways to document and describe the content of HDF5 files in order to generate documentation about the file content, as inspired by this forum post from Mike Jackson of Blue Quartz. The session emphasizes the need for a format that is approachable, shareable, and easily parsable by multiple programming languages. Jelenak discusses various options that have been used, including Excel spreadsheets, JSON, and text formats like YAML. He also presents his own idea of using YAML documents to describe the content of HDF5 files in a hierarchical and straightforward manner. The session concludes with a discussion about the importance of bidirectionality in the toolchain and the potential for future developments in this area.

This session happened on February 20, 2024. You can also watch this episode online.

Call the Doctor is a series of weekly, unscripted, live events! The HDF Group’s staff members will answer attendee questions and, for example, go over the previous week’s HDF Forum posts. The HDF Clinics are free sessions intended to help users tackle real-world HDF problems from a common cold to severe headaches and offer relief where that’s possible. As time permits, we will include how-tos, offer advice on tool usage, review your code samples, teach you survival in the documentation jungle, and discuss what’s new or just around the corner in the land of HDF.

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