LIAS Data Indexing

xref: WaspDataFormats

We need to track data items (example: frame 360 from the visible camera of WASP taken at 2:23:23pm on June 15th, 2005). We need to track attributes of those data items (example: geospatial information about the frame). And, we need to track groupings/associations between data items (example: link to simultaneous frames from other three WASP cameras).

It is possible to come up with schemes whereby one uses attributes to signify the associations. For example, one could have a "simultaneous" attribute for each frame for each camera that references the corresponding frames from other cameras. This will, however, would require extreme care and significant intuition bending. Additionally, it would mean that the association is necessarily duplicated---for this example, the "simultaneous" attribute of each WASP frame would have to reference each of the other WASP frames.

Therefore, I think it important to either put the grouping/association information in a whole separate schema or to elevate them to the level of "data item" so that they can have attributes of their own.

Proposed Schema

The following image shows one nesting of the data that shows the type of information we will have to track for each.

After discovering table inheritance (thank you, SQL1999), the whole scheme previously described here became a great deal simpler. It meshes much more easily with the Venn diagram above. Here's my current working schema.... But, the table inheritance really let me do a bunch of the things that I was trying to do with the overly generic structures that I proposed early without having to resort to basically pretending there was no inherent structure in the data.

Example

This is information from one flight. It will be broken up, automatically, into one flight with three clusters and a bunch of legs.

-- PatrickStein - 01 Sep 2005