File types on ZivaHub | Open Data UCT
ZivaHub is UCT’s open data repository, which provides you with a free place to store and share your research outputs. Research outputs are your publication figures and tables, as well as the data associated with the research that produced your publications. Openly publishing your research
results enhances the rigour and reproducibility of your work, be it quantitative tabular data, geospatial data, qualitative textual data, digital audio, images, video and the related metadata - process documentation, scripts, workflow diagrams, discussion documents and applications.
ZivaHub is powered by Figshare for Institutions (FFI), an online repository platform for discovering, citing and sharing research outputs under an open licence. The purpose of this guide is to give depositors a brief overview of how Figshare handles different file types. Included are some
suggestions for preferred formats in terms of the ‘I’ in FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). UCT has adopted the FAIR principles in its Research Data Management (RDM) policy.1 Selecting an appropriate item type via the drop-down menu when creating your item(s) adds to the
FAIR-compliance of your metadata on ZivaHub. For more details on the required metadata fields to publish your specific research outputs, read our general ZivaHub Start up guide. Setting this up correctly allows ZivaHub to act as a springboard for your data to be indexed and searched by other
harvesting services (such as DataCite , Web of science and CORE ) and most importantly, 2 3 4 for you to be cited when your data is found and reused by others. Data submitted to ZivaHub are reviewed by data stewards from your own research community, while the associated metadata description is moderated by curators at UCT Libraries, ensuring compatibility with the FAIR repository ecosystem.
There are several ways to upload your data, depending on size and volume:
Preview 1000+ files directly in the browser
Over 1000 previewable file formats (click for full listing) are supported for in-browser viewing in ZivaHub. This means that if you upload your data in these file types, 15 different types of viewers will ensure that they are parsed directly in the browser, so that human users and machines will not need to download them to see the contents.
|
File Type |
Description |
|
Quantitative tabular data with extensive metadata A dataset with variable labels, code labels, and defined missing values, in addition to the matrix of data |
● SPSS portable format (.por) ● delimited text and command (‘setup’) file ● (SPSS, Stata, SAS, etc.) containing metadata information ● structured text or mark-up file containing metadata information, e.g. DDI XMLfile |
|
Quantitative tabular data with minimal metadata A matrix of data with or without column headings or variable names, but no other metadata or labelling |
● comma-separated values (CSV) file (.csv) ● tab-delimited file (.txt), including delimited text of given character set with SQL data definition statements where appropriate ● Other acceptable formats: ○ delimited text of given character set -- only characters not present in the data should be used as delimiters (.txt) ○ widely-used formats, e.g. MS Excel (.xls/.xlsx), and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), SQLite, RLDB Ascii DUMP |
|
Geospatial data Vector and raster |
● ESRI File Geodatabase ● ESRI Geopackage ● OGC Geopackage ● Spatialite, SQLite ○ ESRI Shapefile (essential: .shp, .shx, .dbf ; optional: .prj, .sbx, .sbn) ○ GIS Attribute data in tabular formats (text, spreadsheet) ○ Geo-referenced image format with worldfile (TIFF (.tif, .tfw), JPG, PNG, BIL, BIP) ● Other acceptable formats: ○ Any format supported by the GDAL or OGR libraries |
|
Qualitative data Textual |
● eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) text according to an appropriate Document Type Definition (DTD) or schema (.xml) ● Rich Text Format (.rtf) ● plain text data, UTF-8 (Unicode; .txt) ● Other acceptable formats: ○ plain text data, ASCII (.txt) ○ Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) (.html) ○ widely-used proprietary formats, e.g. MS Word (.doc/.docx) ○ LaTeX (.tex) ○ Open document formats, such as Libra Office’s (.odf) |
|
Digital Image data |
● TIFF version 6 uncompressed (.tif) ● Other acceptable formats: ○ JPEG (.jpeg, .jpg) ○ TIFF (other versions; .tif, .tiff) ○ JPEG 2000 (.jp2) ○ PNG ○ SVG ○ GIF |
|
Digital Audio data |
● Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) (.flac) ● Waveform Audio Format (WAV) (.wav) ● MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) - spoken word audio only ● Other acceptable formats: ○ MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) ○ Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) (.aif) |
|
Digital Video data |
● MPEG-4 High Profile (.mp4) ● motion JPEG 2000 (.jp2) ● Other acceptable formats: ○ JPEG 2000 (.mj2) |
|
Documentation and scripts |
● Rich Text Format (.rtf) ● Open Document Text (.odt) ● HTML (.htm, .html) ● Other acceptable formats: ○ plain text (.txt) (Unicode) ○ widely-used proprietary formats, e.g. MS Word (.doc/.docx) or MS Excel (.xls/ .xlsx) ○ Open document formats, such as Libra Office’s (.odf) ○ XML marked-up text (.xml) according to an appropriate DTD or schema, e.g. XHTML 1.0 ○ PDF/A or PDF (.pdf) ○ Jupiter/code .ipynb, py, .txt |
|
Chemistry data spectroscopy data and other plots which require the capability of representing contours as well as peak position and intensity |
● Convert NMR, IR, Raman, UV and Mass Spectrometry files to JCAMP format for ease in sharing. ● JCAMP file viewers: JSpecView, ChemDoodle |
|
Archive |
● .rar ● .zip |
|
Molecule |
● .cif ● .pdb |
|
Presentation |
● widely-used proprietary PowerPoint formats, e.g. ppt, pptx, pptm are all previewed in ZivaHub ● Open document formats, such as Libra Office’s (.odf) |
|
3D Models |
● obj, stl, ply, u3d |
|
Graphs |
● Gephi, gexf ● PNG ● SVG |