On Oct 7, 2009, at 3:40 AM, Christoph Helma wrote:

>>>
>
>> I like the idea of having missing values represented within the  
>> dataset.
>>
>> One thing that would be useful, would be to have consistent  
>> notation to
>> indicate a missing value. Something like 'NA' etc
>
> I disagree.  My impression, is that the whole concept of missing  
> values
> originates from the fact that we (and a lot of software) are trained  
> to
> think in terms of tables. Having a fixed nuber of columns requires of
> course a method to indicate missing values. As soon as we represent a
> dataset differently e.g. like


Yes, this does solve the problem.

But at the same time, non-rectangular data set formats are a pain :-/

(and it's not like including the missing features would overly use up  
space, since the format is already XML!)

----------------------------------------------------
Rajarshi Guha        | NIH Chemical Genomics Center
http://www.rguha.net | http://ncgc.nih.gov
----------------------------------------------------
Heisenberg may have slept here...