Mauro,

Not to beat a dead horse I will only make a few more comments about ASCII
verses Binary. I do want to get some feedback from other members on long
file name standard for the PSN event files.

Mauro Mariotti wrote:

> On the expandibilty of PSN4 format (touchè) i'm not examined it well
> even if the expandibilty of a binary record is not too easy to manage
> especially
> for people that wants to stick one standard but is not so much expert on
> programming tecniques.

First, its not that much more difficult to deal with binary files.... Also,
I don't think a standard should be created or designed around the ability of
someone's programming skills. This is not to say it should be so
complicated, like the SEED format, that even a skilled programmer has
problems extracting data from it.

>
> Using archive compressor the 8 char filename length is a problem.
> Your winquake when access a database of events do a great work analizying
> and reporting
> date time location and comments on the file you're opening.
> If the events file are compressed you cant'do that with winquake.
> Using long names you could create a database readable with Computer
Resource
> of windows
> creating filenames like:
>
> 20000701_145023_PG_E-W_KURILI-ISLANDS_M6.5.TXT
>
> I think you should modify SDR to use long names.
> If i'm not in wrong SDR is DOS based and this can't be done.
> Anyway this is my viewpoint:

Since SDR is a DOS program it is limited to the 8.3 format. WinQuake and my
archival system could save the files using a longer name. I would like to
start a discussion on the new file name format. You can see Mauro proposal
above. I propose a shorter format:

YYYYMMDD.HHMMSS.COMPONENT_TYPE.SENSOR_ID.PSN

Example: 20010705.234505.bhz.lc1.psn

This is similar to how other seismic data archive systems on the net store
event files.

The first two set of numbers are the date and time followed by the component
type like BHZ or LHN and then the sensor ID, this can be 2 to 6 characters
long. By ending the file in PSN, Windows can associate it as an event file
and open it with a program like WinQuake if someone clicks on the file name
using Explorer. Maybe just 2 characters for the year would be ok? This will
become a problem in about 90 years! Anyone else want to suggest a format?

-Larry Cochrane
Redwood City, PSN




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