I am preparing a BIDS dataset and would like to do so in a way that will facilitate converting the tabular information into some binary format, in particular providing dtype information. Are there recommended ways or existing examples of encoding data type information in the json sidecars – information like Int64 vs Int32 vs Float32? For date[times] this is straightforward, because only one format is allowed. Likewise, categorical information is straightforward, in that levels can be provided, and one could use the Description
field to indicate whether the levels have an ordering. For the others, I was about to dump the information in a semi-structured way inside the Description
field (example below). I would be curious to hear about other approaches.
{
"num_vert": {
"LongName": "NumVert",
"Description": "Number of Vertices. dtype: int32."
}