Export formats - JSON

[Graham Mullan]

Data security and future-proofing

There is a well-known maxim in computing that you should never put data into a program if you don't know how you are going to get it out at some unspecified point in the future.

With this in mind, I have little doubt that our successors fifty years from now (if we have any) will not be using any of the tools that we are using now. They will still be wanting to use our data, though, just as I am still using data that was collected in the 1940s and 1950s. If that data has been entered using a simple text editor, as Survex data is, then it will remain wholly available to them. Even Compass data, which is entered using an interface that 'seems' simple becomes less available and useful once you realise that what appears in the data file, when viewed through a text editor is not the native data that was entered originally.

Don't anyone tell me that text editors won't be around in the future.

I still agree with Martin on this

Graham