[vox-tech] collaborative data storage (of excel files)

[Ken Bloom]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:33:44 -0800
Dylan Beaudette <dylan.beaudette at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> some of the people in my lab are interested in collaboratively
> compiling a large quantity of environmental data- each user appending
> several hundred measurements of several variables every week.
> 
> They are currently emailing around a spread sheet file and there have
> been numerous data accidents. Now they are asking to put the file
> onto a shared drive, so that they can access it remotely. This sounds
> like a terrible idea to me- even worse than the previous attempt.
> 
> The data are essentially rows and cols of numbers that are added to
> and edited weekly.
> 
> At first I thought subversion might be helpful, but revision control
> doesn't work so well with binary data (excel files)... unless there
> is something I don't know about. It would be hard to detect
> conflicts, or to merge data. However, it would allow for timestamps
> and revision numbers to provide some level of authority.
> 
> Designing some kind of database-driven system seems like a logical
> choice, but I do not have the time to do this. Perhaps there is
> already something out there.
> 
> Does anyone have some insight into how to solve this data management
> nighmare?

In what format do your colleagues generate their data to begin with?
Is this append-only or are there updates too?

--Ken

-- 
Ken (Chanoch) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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