/obf

Open Behavioral-data Format: a format spec and parser (obf.py) for flat-text behavioral-data files

Primary LanguagePython

Open Behavioral-data Format (OBF) is intended as a precise yet flexible file format.
It is intended for use in psychology and human neuroscience experiments to facilitate
post-processing. The goals of OBF are for data files to be 1) readily intelligible by
human readers; 2) suitable for automated analysis for being unambiguously structured,
yet also highly flexible; 3) easy to implement in stimulus presentation programs;
and 4) sufficiently detailed to be a complete record of a behavioral testing session,
suitable for archival purposes. The main motivation for such a format is to encourage
the development of software for automating some of the data management steps between
data collection and statistical analysis, including formatting data for import into
statistical packages, viewing and quality control, archiving, and sharing.

This project also make available a parser, obf.py, that follow the OBF_spec yet also
goes beyond it in several ways. OBF_spec does not constrain usage conventions,
whereas the parser does so. Some default conventions are implemented, along with a
mechanism for adding custom conventions (including over-riding the defaults).

Examples:
$ python obf.py example.obf