Comparisons to other Data Formats

Purpose

This wiki was created to dispel impressions that ASDF was a narrow format usable only for astronomy. The goal of these comparisons is to show that it can handle problems solved by most other existing formats. We are not advocating that everyone switch to ASDF. But if you are looking for a format for your data, please do contrast its capabilities to others that you are considering.

If we misrepresent the capabilities of formats we are comparing to, please let us know.

• FITS (Flexible Image Transport System)
• HDF5
• NETCDF (TBD)
• zarr (In progress)
• GeoTIFF/TIFF (TBD)