datreant: persistent, pythonic trees for heterogeneous data

In many fields of science, especially those analyzing experimental or simulation data, there is often an existing ecosystem of specialized tools and file formats which new tools must work around, for better or worse. Furthermore, centralized database solutions may be suboptimal for data storage for a number of reasons, including insufficient hardware infrastructure, variety and heterogeneity of raw data, the need for data portability, etc. This is particularly the case for fields centered around simulation: simulation systems can vary widely in size, composition, rules, paramaters, and starting conditions. And with increases in computational power, it is often necessary to store intermediate results obtained from large amounts of simulation data so it can be accessed and explored interactively.

These problems make data management difficult, and serve as a barrier to answering scientific questions. To make things easier, datreant is a collection of Python packages that provide a pythonic interface to the filesystem and the data that lives within it. It solves a boring problem, so we can focus on interesting ones.

Stay organized

datreant offers a layer of flexibility and sanity to the task of analyzing data from many studies, whether they be individual simulations or data from field work. Its core object, the Treant, is designed to be subclassed: the classes in datreant are useful on their own but vanilla by design, and are built to be easily extended into domain-specific objects.

As an example: MDSynthesis, a package for storing, recalling, and aggregating data from molecular dynamics simulations, is built on top of datreant.

The datreant namespace

datreant is a namespace package, which means that it’s more a package of packages. These packages are all dependent on a central, core library, called datreant.core. This documentation is for that core library.

Other packages in the datreant namespace currently include:

Getting datreant

See the installation instructions for installation details. The package itself is pure Python, and light on dependencies by design.

If you want to work on the code, either for yourself or to contribute back to the project, clone the repository to your local machine with:

git clone https://github.com/datreant/datreant.core.git

Contributing

This project is still under heavy development, and there are certainly rough edges and bugs. Issues and pull requests welcome! See Contributing to datreant for more information.