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Welcome to the traj-formats wiki!

There are two overlying goals of establishing formats for trajectories:

1. Provide a uniform schema for objects passed in server/client relations.
2. Provide a space where disparate trajectory inference methods can be compared.

(1) we are generally pushing a column-oriented style json rather than a document model style. The idea here is these formats are designed to transfer information on the web, not enhance the ability to query in a NoSQL database.

(2) is especially difficult, and an open research question. Much like metrics comparing clustering methods, we expect that there will be no correct metric but several different metrics and comparison spaces coming with their own caveats. Understanding those caveats will be critical to interpreting the comparison of two methods. There will be a repo soon with comparison metrics leveraging these formats.

We are proposing that each format bend to a modality of inference, as some inference methods frame their question in significantly different ways.

As a starting point we've spec'd out a "graph" format. This idea is nearly identical in spirit to the concept of a milestone network developed in Saeys et. al.