Recomendations for a good file format to save graph files.

jpearl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: Recomendations for a good file format to save graph files. by moritz (Cardinal) on Mar 24, 2009 at 15:00 UTC
A matrix can be seen as an Array of Arrays, and as such it can be easily written for example as JSON or YAML. There are plenty of Perl modules for both systems, and libraries are also available for many other languages. You could also use something as simple as comma separated values, so excel and other spreadsheet apps can read it easily.	[reply]
Re^2: Recomendations for a good file format to save graph files. by jpearl (Scribe) on Mar 24, 2009 at 15:22 UTC
Thanks Moritz, I would probably lean towards something like JSON, mainly since I'd like to point to other modules/libraries/etc that would easily parse the data without a lot of hassle for any others trying to read the file (hey, use "org.json" you java person). My main concern is other programmers being able to easily read my file. (There are several languages at use here...) At the moment most of our data is stored in flat files that are tab-delimited. I'd like to push for a standardized format, something like XML that's got a lot of pre-constructed parsing options. And that we can store some meaningful tag information in (i.e. <undirected>, <node>, <edge>, etc). Which is why it would be great to have a format specific to graphs.	[reply]
Re: Recomendations for a good file format to save graph files. by etj (Priest) on Jun 03, 2022 at 22:02 UTC
An XML-based format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphML A JSON-based one: https://github.com/jsongraph/json-graph-specification	[reply]
Re: Recomendations for a good file format to save graph files. by blahblahblah (Priest) on Mar 25, 2009 at 00:03 UTC
I've been pondering a similar problem lately, so I'd like to piggyback on the OP's question. We currently use a messy mix of YAML, JSON, and other homegrown formats to store various pieces of configuration data in our app. We are planning on writing a couple of features soon which depend on representing the entire system configuration in one big text file. We're leaning towards XML, because of a similar requirement to the OP's: that the file be easy to read and manipulate in languages other than Perl. I am slightly worried that we don't know what we're getting ourselves into, and that the one-big-file is going to wind up being just as much of a nightmare to deal with as our current hodgepodge of separate files. Can anyone suggest good resources for reading up on this? Is there a public library of standard XML formats, so that we won't have to re-invent the wheel? Is a well-designed DTD our magical answer for other languages? Has anyone traveled a similar path and learned any good lessons? Thanks, Joe	[reply]
Re: Recomendations for a good file format to save graph files. by zentara (Cardinal) on Mar 25, 2009 at 12:35 UTC
Hi, google for "PDL maillist", join, and ask there. There are some special formats it has for storing astronomical data as matrix...2x2 grid of pixels. So you can use PDL and it's helper modules. I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth My Petition to the Great Cosmic Conciousness	[reply]