Technical report: CSVM dictionaries

Abstract: CSVM (CSV with Metadata) is a simple file format for tabular data. The possible application domain is the same as typical spreadsheets files, but CSVM is well suited for long term storage and the inter-conversion of RAW data. CSVM embeds different levels for data, metadata and annotations in human readable format and flat ASCII files. As a proof of concept, Perl and Python toolkits were designed in order to handle CSVM data and objects in workflows. These parsers can process CSVM files independently of data types, so it is possible to use same data format and parser for a lot of scientific purposes. CSVM-1 is the first version of CSVM specification, an extension of CSVM-1 for implementing a translation system between CSVM files is presented in this paper. The necessary data used to make the translation are also coded in another CSVM file. This particular kind of CSVM is called a CSVM dictionary, it is also readable by the current CSVM parser and it is fully supported by the Python toolkit. This report presents a proposal for CSVM dictionaries, a working example in chemistry, and some elements of Python toolkit usable to handle these files.