To achieve this, a DBMS needs to help ecological scientists do science. This can be done by efficient reduction in the researchers time devoted to hardware and software juggling. Equipment investments to support this level of DBMS for a long term project must be made with a great deal of forethought and commitment.
Files can be of any basic structural type, including statistical data, text data, image data.
Note that file type refers to the general nature of the data in the file, and not to data typing such as floating point, integer, or character. The intent is to define a generic data structure that can be useful on any hardware and software system, and that can be sent on any electronic network or file transfer system. The Intersite Archive File structure was defined in order to facilitate the need for an orderly approach to the design and implementation of a data management capability for environmental research. Note that file type refers to the general nature of the data in the file, and not to data typing such as floating point, integer, or character. The general categories of data in an Intersite Archive File is as follows.