Change of plans for SciYAG

Initially, the SciYAG program in the SciYAG project was intended as a direct competitor for the interactive part of gnuplot, while ctioga is definitely a good competitor of the "output" part (get convinced there). I had some part working, with a command-line working exactly as ctioga and some reasonable features.

However, with time, I found that what I'm really missing in my everyday scientific work is not an interactive gnuplot clone. As far as I can tell, gnuplot is jolly good itself for that, and we have a neat home-brewed program called Soas that does the job pretty well, and is tailored to our needs.

So, then, what ? What I really miss is a good program to organise my data. Here is the features I'm missing:

• First, I want to be able to attach meta-data to my datafiles, such as the buffer used for the experiment, the pH values, and so on. All these should be fully customizable on a per-experiment or per-experiment-type basis
• I want to be able to browse quickly to my experiments, sorting them according to their type, their values of their meta-data
• Of course, I'm interested to actually display the data, possibly massively, possibly as a function of some of the meta-data
• I also want to be able to associate series of fits of different kinds to each of the datafiles, and be able to quickly check them (visually, by displaying the fit and the data), and plot the parameters found there as a function of meta-data.
• And more !

This may sound ambitious, but actually, with a great programming language like Ruby, it is fun. A great deal of the architecture is already in place. What I'm currently working on is a way to store all the data. The trick is to make it so it can evolve easily, as I'll be using this program extensively for my own needs, and I don't want to reenter any meta-data already in. A good architecture should also please the lazy in me (which amounts to, say, 95%...) and have me type in only what is absolutely necessary - so most values for meta-data should be shared or guessed.

There is currently no release of SciYAG, though you can chance a look at it's SVN repository. Be sure I'll keep you posted about my progresses on the field !