[Hdf-forum] how to develope storage structure for a mixed type table ?

[Forest Yang]

 I have a set of data organized as the following table:

Day 1

CIty                   Temperature     Latitude
 none                      [c]                [deg]
NYC                       10                  60
NJ                          10                   60
Washington             20                   50
San Francisco         30                   40

Day 2

....

Day 365.


I hope I can store them as a hdf5 file, and use HDFView for example to
plot the latitude .vs. temperature curve for a specific day. and the
column should be expandable, for example I may need one more column on
"populations of each city"

currently I can store pure data as a table, and the city name part as
a new "string type table" with same row as the data table. The
name/meaning of each column, "latitude" and "temperature" and their
"Unit" as other "string type tables", This is quite separated.  Seems
not a good scheme. Since I need the expandability, I can not use a
compound datatype to store each line of the above table.

Can anyone shed some like on this problem ?

Thanks.


Forest.